Pomegranate molasses & date biscuits

I swore before we moved that I wouldn't get involved with the PTA. 

At least, not straight away.

"I've done my time on playgroup and school committees", I told myself. "I've baked cakes, I've made tea, I've driven myself half deaf and slightly crazy, listening to Crazy Frog, Nelly the Elephant and Jessie J, while mercilessly taking money from small children in return for glow sticks at any number of school discos. I've transformed (ahem) any number of the little angels into tigers, puppies, butterflies and pirates through the power of Snazaroo. I've done the admin, drunk the cheap coffee and shared in the frustrations of any group of volunteers struggling to do their best for the organisation they are supporting. Enough."

I went along to the first PTA meeting that was advertised after we moved.

A secret part of me would like to be cool, aloof, the kind of person everyone wants to have in their gang. The kind of person who doesn't leap in with both feet often to trip over in an ungainly fashion - metaphorically and, sadly, actually - in the varied social challenges life presents us with. But I'm just not. I'm a joiner. There's no point pretending to be anything other than what I am. Watch out for me in a few years, sensible shoes on, wielding secateurs or a wicker basket (possibly both) directing operations at a village fete near you. I've seen the future and, at its most cliched, it involves a ridiculous straw hat - depending on the weather of course. I've had a number of worrying urges in the direction of ridiculous straw hats recently. 

The thing about joining in is that it helps you meet people and make friends. I guess I was thinking I could take the 'sit back and let the friendships happen' approach but honestly, that's ridiculously arrogant, especially when I am hardly ever at school, and I work from home. I hasten to add that it's not an approach I've ever taken before, but it crossed my mind that I might avoid some of the ungainly tripping over if I did.  

The thing is, that if you join in, you meet people. They may not be always kindred spirits, but you can build a network, make connections with others, get out of the house. I knew that one of the hardest things about moving would be uprooting all of us from the community we lived in before - where at any given time if I went out I'd be bound to see someone I knew - in the shops, in the pub, out for a walk with the dog. My children had been to playgroup, then to the village primary school with the same group of kids, for 8 years. Same kids, same parents. That roots you in a place even more than I had appreciated. And it's not so easy to regrow those roots if you come into a community at a later stage. There's so much shared history you have with others if your kids have grown up together. Not necessarily because you are best friends with everyone, but because you've gone through that crazy baby and young child stage, seen the same changes in your community, seen teachers come and go, new buildings go up, shops close down. The children are comfortable with each other - they all know how the others tick, the ties that bind.

Coming away from that has been very hard. Through the power of Facebook I know what's going on in the village we used to live in at a very superficial level. The outdoor swimming pool that was at risk of closure has reopened for the summer, there's a new greengrocer on the high street, the Church fete took place at the weekend... but I'm not part of it any more. The other thing is that people also only have so much space for new friends. Yes, they can be welcoming, friendly, but time is precious to everyone, and investing time in new friendships is not necessarily near the top of people's agendas. I know this. It is a fact and I understand it from being in the position when we were part of the established community and new people moved in. Now, thought, the boot is on the other foot and we are the newcomers, the people who want to make friends and establish roots in a new community.

I could sink into a morass of self-pity and despair but frankly that's not going to get anyone anywhere is it, now, so Friday after school, I rolled up my sleeves and spent 2 hours face painting at the school fete. It was intense, I tell you. But my fellow face painter was someone I hadn't met before, and we're meeting up for coffee. This makes me very happy.

I am also hoping that making some biscuits to take along with me to her house using dates and pomegranate molasses will not turn out to be another ungainly trip in my social life's little path. I have no idea what she likes and dislikes, but I decided that something like this avoids the obvious chocolate route, there's the option to joke about 'healthy' biscuits (there's dates in them - of COURSE they are healthy, go on, have another one...) and they have a sweet lemony-ness from the pomegranate molasses to them that is interesting (in a good way) yet not overpowering. I'm hoping they will taste delicious with coffee.

Pomegranate molasses & date biscuits

Makes 15-18 (depending on how big your walnuts are*).


50g soft light brown suger
50g pomegranate molasses
125g soft unsalted butter
1 egg yolk
175g plain flour
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
3/4 tsp baking powder
2tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground all spice
175g dates, stoned and chopped
100g  poppy seeds/sesame seeds (optional)


Beat together the sugar, molasses and butter till creamy, then add in the egg yolk and continue to beat till fluffy.

Sift in the flour, bicarb, baking powder and ground spices, and carefully fold everything together.

Beat in the dates till everything is combined

Cover the bowl with clingfilm and pop in the fridge for the mixture to firm up - leave for at least 30 minutes, but up to a week if necessary.

When ready to bake, line a couple of baking trays with greasproof paper and pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Sprinkle the seeds on a plate, then take walnut sized* balls of the mixture (I used a tablespoon measure to scoop out mixture, ice cream style and got about 16 biscuits) and flatten them into the seeds to about 1 cm thickness/4-5cm diameter. Cover both sides with seeds then place on the lined baking tray.

(I only used half the amount of seeds and didn't cover all of the biscuits, just in case poppy seeds weren't to my hostess's liking...)

Bake for 15-20 mins till the edges are firm and any biscuit you can see (as opposed to the seeds, especially if you use poppy seeds) are golden brown. 

Fruity Peanut Butter Cookies

Sometimes, there are just too many words, aren't there. Too many emotions, too much noise, too much to do, and not enough time.

And sometimes, you realise that you are a long way from a lot of the people you love and you're not going to see them that afternoon on the school run, and you can't just magically make your son feel better about being uprooted from his friends, or stop him winding his sister up because that's how he best expresses his displeasure with life.

And sometimes, you can't stop the dog licking the toads that have chosen your garden as toad-sex central, so that he is sick. Alot. Turns out toads can release toxins and shag at the same time. Nice one!


Sometimes you just need to bake cookies instead. (And eat a few of them.) 'Talking' (texting/messaging/emailing) to some of those good friends helps too (you know who you are :-))

But on the cookie side of things, I'd recommend these ones. Just saying.

Fruity Peanut Butter Cookies

200g crunchy peanut butter

125g unsalted butter, at room temperature

150g caster sugar

150g light muscovado sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

1 large egg

125g wholemeal self raising flour

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

125g rolled oats

140g berries & cherries dried fruit mix, or dried sour cherries as you like

You’ll also need 3-4 baking sheets lined with greaseproof paper.

Pre-heat the oven to 170C

Put the peanut butter, butter, sugars, vanilla and egg into a bowl and beat until evenly mixed together.

Sift together the flour and bicarbonate of soda, then beat in to the mixture, followed by the oats and the fruit.

Spoon balls of the mixture – about the size of a walnut (shell on – I used a tablespoon measure which worked quite well) – onto your baking trays, leaving a good 3 cm between each ball, then flatten slightly with a fork.

You should get around 30, although I got 27 and ate the left over dough raw. It was that kind of a day.

Bake for 20 minutes or so till lightly golden on top but still relatively squidgy. Leave the cookies to cool on the tray for 5 minutes before cooling completely on a wire rack. Although, to be honest, eating one warm isn't going to hurt...

The Hunger Games - and Chocolate Digestives

One of my favourite things to do is to curl up with a good book, a cup of tea, and a packet of biscuit. I'm a sucker for a book and a biscuit, but the combination rarely arises. For a start, I'm not a fan of eating biscuits in bed (sorry, I just can't do crumbs in bed. Too itchy.) and bed is where I tend to do most of my reading, cramming as many pages in before unconsciousness engulfs me.

I'm happy to read pretty much anything apart from proper horror, although I tend to the modern fiction (apparently - that's what someone told me once, faced with my 'books I had read recently list' that I was asked to provide on a job application form - although I had to explain that the way I chose books was pretty much on cover alone) and I've usually got a few books on the go. At the moment, I'm reading John Sargeant's autobiography, The Tent the Bucket and Me by Emma Kennedy (again - in preparation for the camping season - it's hilarious) The Red House by Mark Haddon, and 'The Welsh Learner's Dictionary' (!) but there's always room for more books in my life - just never enough time.

Blue recently started to ask me if he could read 'The Hunger Games'. Now, this hasn't been completely off my radar, but with both children at primary school, and my understanding that this was 'teen fiction', it hasn't been anything I've paid much attention to - I've paid so little attention to it that initially I assumed it was some kind of Sweet Valley High (anyone else remember them?) teen trash about Valley girls and their competitive eating disorders. How wrong can you be?

By the time he asked if he could read them, I was aware that there was a little bit more to it than that - the posters for the films suggested that if nothing else, and just before we moved, I had a conversation with a couple of other mums whose kids are the same age as Blue, and who were reading them. I'm all for the children reading as much and as widely as possible, but in the same way that I want to know what they are watching on TV, when a book comes along that I'm not too sure about, I want to make sure I'm not setting off to read something that's completely unsuitable. My mum helps a lot - she seems to spend hours rooting out good books for him: most recently she introduced him to the Alex Rider books by Anthony Horowitz. Totally fantastic. Blue has devoured them, both on his own and with us reading them to him, and I've been hooked too.

The Hunger Games hasn't cropped up on Mum's reading list yet, so I was on my own. Fortune found us the trilogy very cheaply in The Works (I meant to get it from the library, but we haven't sorted out library membership yet) and I started reading the first book in the trilogy - the eponymous 'Hunger Games') on Friday night.

Well I was utterly gripped from the start. If you haven't read it, it is certainly not teen valley trash. It's a very gripping adventure novel, and although an adult version might include more complexity, as far as I'm concerned,  it was pretty much perfect. I knew I was going to have to give in and read, hang the ironing and everything else that needed doing yesterday afternoon - I'd already walked the dog and made a chilli for dinner and we had no other plans.

The fire was blazing, and I was all set, but then, disaster! No biscuits!! In our old life, I might have just popped up to the Co-Op, 2 minutes round the corner on foot, but popping to the shops here involves a 6 mile round trip.

Still, with nothing more pressing to do than read my book, a bit of light baking was perfectly acceptable. The original recipe was a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall one in River Cottage Everyday, but although I had oats, I had no oatmeal, and only muscovado sugar - but even if I'd made the round trip to the shops, I wasn't convinced I'd find what I needed, so I improvised (although in writing this post, I see that Hugh also improvises the same way when he repeats his recipe 5 years later...)

I've made these digestives once before - I mean who doesn't like a digestive biscuit? Especially a chocolate one. What I had forgotten though is that I've only made them once because the dough is of the crumbly and tricky type, so clear the area if you have a propensity for bad language when baking doesn't go your way...


The last time I made them, I didn't add the chocolate - the recipe I used didn't even suggest it. I was idly wondering how to achieve the chocolatey-ness, then I found this fantastic idea on another blog called I'd Much Rather Bake than... . Well, exactly. 

Chocolate Digestives

250g wholemeal self raising flour
250g unsalted butter, cut into cubes and at room temperature
250g rolled oats, whizzed up in a food processor to resemble oatmeal
100g light muscovado sugar
2 tsp fine salt
1 tsp baking powder
1-2 tbsp milk
squares of dark chocolate - this makes about 25-30 biscuits depending on the size of cutter you use, so you need one per biscuit. 

Process the flour and butter together (or rub together as you would for a crumble) till they look like fine breadcrumbs. 

Mix in the oats, sugar, salt and baking powder taking care that there are no lumps of the sugar, and add the milk a little at a time till you have a slightly sticky dough.

Form the dough into a flat disc, wrap in clingfilm, and leave in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

Depending on how long the dough has been in the fridge you may want to get it out for a little before you attempt to roll it out (to reduce the likelihood of language). It's also a good idea to roll this out between 2 sheets of greaseproof or clingfilm. Am I putting you off yet?

Anyway, pre-heat the oven to 180C, line some baking trays with greaseproof, roll out the dough however which way you want, and cut out with an appropriate cutter. I used the open end of a pint glass which was about 8 cm, so I got fewer, bigger biscuits.

Pop the biscuits on the lined baking sheets and bake for around 10 minutes, then whip out the tray, pop a square of chocolate on each biscuit and pop back in the oven for 30 seconds or so till the choc starts to melt.

Get the trays back out of the oven then use a knife to spread the chocolate round. Leave the biscuits to cool on the tray for a few minutes before using a palette knife to put them on to a cooling rack.

You'll see that mine aren't the most beautifully chocolated biscuits ever - that's because I didn't have enough chocolate, so I used half a square on each biscuit rather than a whole one. Also, I had a book to read. You can take more time making them beautiful.
  
Make a cup of tea, get your book, a plate of biscuits and settle down for a good read.