Look what I made!

So this pregnancy malarkey means that I've picked up a nasty habit of eating between meals, something I've spent the last ten years untraining myself to do, with varying levels of success. I've been trying very hard to stick to things that are good for me, like fruit or seeds or whatever is in my graze box, but sometimes you just need something a bit more... substantial.



So I adapted a recipe for oat and raisin cookies to use up stuff we had in the cupboards. And here's how it turned out:




If you want to make your own, here's what you need:



4 tbsp butter (see, not even that much!)

125g caster sugar (but no-one's going to tell if you use granulated, or whatever you have to hand)

1 egg, beaten (I didn't beat mine first. I don't think it mattered)

50g plain flour

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking powder

175g rolled oats

125g dried apricots (originally raisins, but we have loads of apricots, and I didn't fancy picking the raisins out of the dried fruit mix we bought them in)

2tsp flaked almonds (originally sesame seeds but almonds just seemed like a better idea)



Start off by lightly greasing 2 baking trays with butter. Or oil spray, if you prefer. Put the oven on to 180 degrees, gas mark 4, or if you have a fan cooker like our new one (can't get used to it), about 160 degrees. Using a food processor, I then chucked in the ingredients in the following order: sugar, butter, egg, flour, salt, baking powder, oats, apricots (which I chopped in the mini food processor), almonds. This isn't how the book says to do it, but they still turned out lovely and tasty and only took me about four minutes to make.

You should manage to get about 12 dessert-spoon sized ball shapes out of these. If you cook them for 12-15 minutes in big lumps, they stay nice and chewy in the middle and crunchy on the outside. For a more biscuity, less flapjacky texture, shape them into biscuit shapes. I made half and half, and the biscuity ones went more quickly. I had to play about a bit with the timing because I'm not quite up to speed with how our oven works yet, but I took them out of the oven once I'd finished washing up, and when they started to look toasty-brownish on top.

For my next batch I'm going to use up some apples and throw in some cinnamon. What's your favourite flavour mix?