Take the good old Iced VoVo, the iconic Australian biscuit of our grandparents’ generation. Make it round instead of rectangular, pile on lots of fresh soft marshmallow, coconut and homemade raspberry jam, and I defy you to find a better biscuit for a cup of tea.
Ingredients
Marshmallow
Method
Main
1.Rub together the sifted flour, icing sugar, butter and pinch of sea salt to a fine crumb. Add the egg and mix as little as possible to bring the pastry together. Wrap into 3-4 manageable portions and chill in the refrigerator for at least a couple of hours; the dough will keep for several days.
2.Preheat the oven to 180C. Line a baking tray with baking paper. Roll out the dough to about 3mm thick, then cut into twelve 7cm-diameter discs. Bake for 15 minutes, or until cooked through and golden brown. Remove from the oven and cool on the tray.
3.For marshmallow, put the sugar and glucose in a heavy-based saucepan with 70ml of water. Bring to the boil and cook to the soft-ball stage (118C on a sugar thermometer). Leave to cool to 100C. Put the gelatine in a heatproof bowl with 90ml of cold water. After about 5 minutes, once the gelatine has soaked up all the water, place the bowl over a saucepan of hot water to melt the mixture briefly, then add it to the hot sugar syrup. Use hand-held electric beaters or an electric mixer with a whisk attachment to beat the marshmallow until light, fluffy and cool.
4.To serve, pipe a ring of marshmallow around the edge of each biscuit. Dip each into the coconut and put a teaspoonful of raspberry jam in the centre. These biscuits are best eaten the next day – the marshmallow gets a nice chewy stickiness to it.
Note To make moon pie biscuits, prepare as above, but pipe marshmallow around only six biscuits, then top each of these with a teaspoonful of blackberry or boysenberry jam, instead of raspberry jam. Put the other biscuits on top and allow to firm for 30 minutes, then dip the biscuits in a melted chocolate mixture. This recipe is from Sweet Envy ($45, hbk) by Alistair Wise and Teena Kearney-Wise, published by Murdoch Books, and has been reproduced with minor GT style changes.
Notes
