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Anzac biscuits, reinvented

MAKES ABOUT 20 // PREP TIME 15 MINS // COOK 10-12 MINS

I’ve made these the size of regular biscuits, but they’re

also very good made larger. For a crisper biscuit, meanwhile,

flatten the balls of dough on the tray before baking.

1 cup rolled oats

1 cup coconut chips

1 cup wholemeal flour

½ cup demerara sugar

1 tbsp golden syrup

1 tsp bicarbarbonate of soda

½ cup melted unsalted butter

(about 125gm)

1 Preheat the oven to 150°C

(fan of).

2 Combine oats, coconut, flour

and sugar in a mixing bowl.

3 Mix golden syrup, bicarb and

2 tbsp boiling water in a bowl,

stir until the mixture is foaming,

then stir in melted butter.

4 Stir the syrup and butter

mixture into the dry ingredients,

and mix well (your hands are

good for this). Taste, and add

a pinch of salt if it needs it.

5 Place spoonfuls of the

mixture on lightly floured trays,

leaving plenty of room for them

to spread.

6 Bake until they’re dark

golden, starting to check

around the 10-minute mark.

7 Allow biscuits to cool on

the trays (they’re soft when

they’re hot).

8 Biscuits will keep for up to a

week in an airtight container.●

biscuits that won the hearts of two
nations. It was only after the war
ended that oats became a standard of
the recipe, and no printed reference
to coconut appeared until 1929.
The War Memorial offers two other
Anzac recipes that bear much closer
resemblance to the bickies we know
and love. The first, from a 1926 edition
ofThe Capricornian, a Rockhampton
newspaper, specifies two cups of oats
to a cup of flour and half a cup of
sugar. You mix a tablespoonful of
golden syrup, two of boiling water
and a teaspoon of bicarb till they
froth, then add half a cup of melted
butter, and mix that into the dry
ingredients. Spoonfuls go onto a
“floured slide”, are baked in a slow
oven, and magic ensues.
Coconut gets its day in the
Country Women’s Association of
New South Wales’s 1933Calendar of
Cake and Afternoon Tea Delicacies. It’s
a notably sweeter biscuit, with more
sugar, less flour, and coconut taking
the place of half the oats.
Dig a little deeper and you’ll see
that “traditional” recipes vary even more widely still. You
don’t have to look far in 1920s cookbooks to find references
to iced Anzacs, or others sandwiched around jam. A 1929
recipe from theBrisbane Courierincludes cinnamon, mixed
spice and finely chopped dates. Tasty? Sure. But to me it
sounds like it might bring you uncomfortably close to a
$50,000 fine if you wanted to sell them as Anzac biscuits.
As a dyed-in-the-wool Anzac fan, I had a good think
about what exactly makes them so appealing. My feeling
is that it’s the austerity-roughage factor of the oats and
coconut, the combination of crisp edges and a bit of chew
(something the biscuits for the men in Gallipoli almost
certainly didn’t have) and the unrefined rawness of the
golden syrup.
And it was this idea of roughness and rawness that
I thought could chime with today’s bakers’ love of rawer, less
refined ingredients. Substituting coconut oil for butter would
probably be delicious, but might lose sight of the virtue of
the original. But what about swapping out the plain flour for
something stoneground and wholemeal? Demerara for white
sugar? What if I let the butter brown a bit in the pan when
I melted it? I thought blending the best of the two classic
recipes, updating them with better ingredients, might pay off.

E

very time I could opt for

something less milled, bleached

or crushed, I went for it. I think

the big win might’ve been

the oats. In Hobart I stumbled across

a brand of oats rolled by Callington Mill,

“Australia’s only wind-rolled oats”, made

using a century-old oat-roller. I am fully

cognisant of just howPortlandia-precious

the mention of oats ground in the

country’s only operating Georgian

windmill is, believe me. But they’re

bloody good oats – fresh, creamy and

coarse in texture rather than something

refined to buggery and designed to sit on

a supermarket shelf until the Rapture.

The fact they’re made in a place called

Oatlands seals the deal.

I gave some thought to shredding

my own coconut and using it fresh, but

decided in the end to go with rougher-cut

product from the shop. I didn’t churn

the butter myself, or use my own tears in

place of the salt, and I used a regular gas

oven rather than anything wood-fired or

the power of the sun’s rays. Georgian

windmills are one thing, but there’s no

sense in going overboard.

Less-refined products are going to vary

more considerably in things like moisture

content than plainer flours and sugars, so

I recommend using your eyes and fingers

to judge the wetness of your dough (it

should be just sticky enough to hold

together) and how long you cook your

biscuits. I like mine just shy of burnt;

start checking the oven around the

10-minute mark. As I said, I like a bit

of chew in a biscuit, so I baked mine

slow rather than hot and fast. (The choice

to go with non-fan-forced baking stems

purely from the fact my oven was made

in 1942 rather than any serious

experimentation on that front.)

And the result? I am very happy

with it. I don’t know that I’d dare to

call them healthier, but these Anzacs

are considerably less sweet than most

commercial offerings, and have much

more texture, especially where the oats

and coconut are concerned.

The Anzac is a forgiving biscuit, even

for the novice baker. It calls for nothing

hard to find, and can be made without

scales or a mixer. And the best Anzacs

are those you make yourself, however

recherché your oats. Put them next to

a cup of tea with friends and pause a

moment to reflect on the Australians

and New Zealanders who ate them more

than 100 years ago in less comfortable

circumstances. Lest we forget.

GOURMET TRAVELLER 93