Homemade Hobnobs: The Oat Cookie Built for Dunking

Most biscuits fall apart in your tea in under 5 seconds. This one comes out in one piece. It was built for dunking. These are Hobnobs, the oaty, golden syrup biscuit Ireland and Britain dunk in their tea. Hi, I'm Gemma Stafford, a professional chef from Ireland, and today I'm going to show you how to make Hobnobs with that unique snap. I'm going to show you the one ingredient that makes them taste like the real thing and how to swirl chocolate on top of them So biscuits, as we call them in England and Ireland, are incredibly easy to make. And when I was young, I used to make a ton of them, including this biscuit. I would make them all by hand in a bowl. So we don't need a stand mixer. We're just going to get right into it. It's a few ingredients, really easy to make a fantastic recipe for kids. So here I have some butter. Now the key to making this by hand is that your butter is nice and soft, just like that room temperature butter. I honestly leave mine sit out overnight. And if I don't have time and I want to make these last minute, I'll pop it into the microwave very carefully watching. Our next ingredient is brown sugar. Now I go for dark brown sugar. You can also use light if you have it. But dark brown sugar has that extra molasses and extra molasses means extra caramel flavor. When it comes to brown sugar in England and Ireland, we actually get really coarse brown sugar, very different to what we get here in America. So whatever brown sugar you choose, make sure that it's really nice and soft and fine and not in big granules, not sugar in the raw, because it has to be able to completely combine and dissolve into your cookies. Otherwise it'll stay in lumps. So into these ingredients, we are going to add in a very special ingredient that we use a lot in Irish baking, golden syrup. Now the equivalent to this is kind of like a dark corn syrup, or you can use honey. But golden syrup is better because it has less flavor. It is fantastic for baking. The thing about it is now that I live in Los Angeles, it can be very hard to come by and very expensive. So of course, I have a recipe of how you can make it yourself at home. All it is is sugar and water. And it is so easy to make and it will last in your cupboard for months. Now I have a hand whisk here. You can also use a wooden spoon like I used to do when I was a child. And we're just going to whisk these all up. Make sure you have a nice big bowl to give yourself some space to whisk. My first cookbook, the very first chapter was recipes you could do by hand with a bowl and a whisk or a bowl and a wooden spoon. There were so many cookies, biscuits, all sorts of things in there because that's what I did when I was a child. I went into the kitchen and I made all of these by hand. You just want to whisk this until it's nice and creamed together. The golden syrup and the sugar in this recipe give you that lovely caramel flavor. The golden syrup also gives you that crisp, that bite and a little bit of almost of chew. So it's really important you don't want to leave that out. Okay, lovely. This is well combined. Nice and smooth. Now let's mix together our dry ingredients. I like to do this in a separate bowl just so they're well combined. Here I have some rolled oats. You can use quick cooking oats for this cookie if you want. But traditionally it is rolled oats and they do work a little bit better. I would not use oat flour because that will perform differently. And definitely not jumbo oats. I know in Ireland you can get jumbo oats. Here I have flour. Now I like to use whole wheat flour. In America I get fine whole wheat flour or also known as wholemeal flour. It's very fine. In other countries it can be coarser so try and find the finest one. The whole wheat flour does give you a lovely nuttiness and kind of like a wholemealy flavor. If you don't have it you can use all purpose flour or you can use half and half whatever you like. We have a little bit of salt for a flavor. Some baking powder to help them rise. Baking soda to give you that kind of crinkle and to aid with that chew. And then just give those a little mix together to make sure they're well combined before we add them into our other ingredients. And then into our wet ingredients. And then simply with a spatula combine the ingredients together. So I know every country has their cookies but in Ireland biscuits are really important because we are a nation of tea drinkers. We have a huge tea culture there. We do something called elevenses which is after your breakfast in the middle of the morning at 11 o'clock you will have tea and a biscuit. And then also we have the afternoon like the three o'clock time where we'll also do tea coffee and biscuits there too. And the thing about our biscuits that's different to cookies in America is that they're dry and they're crisp. Now when I was growing up that was not very nice. It seems like why are our biscuits and cookies so dry and crisp. But it's because they are made to be dunked into tea. That is the whole purpose of them. The purpose of digestive biscuits. The purpose of these hob knobs. They are to be paired with tea time. And once you bite into a tea soaked cookie let me tell you it's pretty amazing. There you go. Our dough is combined and it is ready to be scooped. If you want to you can put it into the fridge to firm. Otherwise you can scoop straight away. I'm all about aging a cookie dough so if you want to make these in advance and like keep them in the fridge for a few days the flavor will just develop even more. Also what I like to do when I make cookies is that I scoop them and I keep some in the freezer so then anytime I have guests or a party or I'm going to like a picnic or a school event I take them out to frost them, bake them off fresh. Everybody loves them. That's my mom trick. Okay this looks good I'm going to scoop these now. So to scoop your dough I like to use a one tablespoon scoop. When I say one tablespoon it's always level that's just my rule a level tablespoon. It does make a nice big cookie and that's all the dough you need. For my cookies I always love to give them a little roll in the palm of my hand just to make sure that when they bake you get a nice kind of round cookie. So give them a little bit of room on your baking sheets to spread out because they will spread out a little bit. Feel free to refrigerate your dough if it feels a little bit soft it'll be easier to scoop when it's firmer. Bigger Bolder Baking has a real universal audience so when I started 13 years ago can you believe it, I was hearing from people in different countries that they couldn't get Oreos, that they couldn't get graham crackers, people in America couldn't get digestives, which all makes sense. When I was in Ireland I couldn't get corn syrup, I couldn't get Oreos, I couldn't get any of those ingredients to make recipes that were from America. I couldn't even make the recipes because everything was in cups. That's why I do all my recipes in cups, grams, and ounces. So I decided to start making these recipes homemade so on BiggerBolderBaking.com I've homemade graham crackers, homemade digestive biscuits, homemade Oreos, homemade Biscoff, homemade Goldfish crackers, loads of homemade versions of your favorite store-bought treats just so they're accessible to everybody because that was really important to me. I know that feeling being from like a small little island where you can't get a lot of stuff. So there you go that's it, two trays ready to go into the oven. So when baking two trays I always like to bake fan assist so the air can circulate and your cookies will bake evenly. So bake at 325 degrees Fahrenheit 165 degrees Celsius for roughly 10 to 12 minutes. They do not take long at all and you want them to be a lovely even golden brown. If you do not have fan on your oven do not worry, bake one tray at a time you might want to rotate them to make sure that they get a lovely even color. While the cookies are baking we're going to answer some hotline questions about these cookies that came in on our website. So what if you don't have golden syrup? Great question, you can make your own and it's really easy and I'm going to put a link to the video and the recipe in the description box. How long can you keep these cookies? So biscuits unlike kind of American cookies last quite a long time because they're dry so if you keep them at room temperature they'll be totally fine for around three days which is the beauty of a biscuit. And also what if mine spread too much? That's a great question, if they spread too much your dough might have been a little bit too warm so definitely chill your dough before you bake them and then they'll kind of be more inclined to keep their shape. Our cookies are done and they look gorgeous, even better than the store-bought. They're a lovely golden brown on top and they smell like caramel oaty goodness. Hobnobs can be plain and eat them just as they are or they can have chocolate on them. I love to do a semi-sweet chocolate, something that's not too bitter, not too sweet, but you do get a lovely chocolate kick. And just like a real store-bought hobnob, turn it over and put the chocolate on the flat side. Set them aside to let the chocolate set, you can also pop them in the fridge. These kind of recipes to me are my comfort food, they feed my soul because this is what I grew up with. These are the kind of biscuits I ate as a child. So all these years later it's lovely to be able to make them in my own kitchen in Los Angeles even though I'm far away from home. As is, these biscuits are crispy and crunchy and have a lovely snap. Dunked in tea is a whole other story. Every biscuit in Ireland is judged on one thing, how long it lasts in a cup of tea. One, two, three, four, five. Still a biscuit. That's the oats and the golden syrup doing their job. And it's tea soaked without falling apart. That's a perfect hobnob. So listen to this. Right next to my microphone you can hear that lovely crisp. And even when it is soaked in tea, it still has a lovely bite. Better than store-bought by a mile. I really hope you enjoyed this episode and make these cookies. Thank you so much for watching. I'll be back here same time, same place next week with more Bigger Bolder Baking.