When I make sloe wine, I leave the fruit in until I'm ready to bottle and drink it, as for sloe gin. This year, I thought it would be a shame to throw out the fruit when I'd finished, but couldn't think of anything to do with it, so I pushed it through a sieve to make sloe pureé, and put in a couple of jars. With the high sugar and alcohol content, I wasn't too worried about it going off.
Sloe pureé
That was before Christmas and I still hadn't thought of a use for it, though as expected, it's kept well. Then I came across this recipe for sloe biscuits. It uses fresh sloes and a dash of sloe gin, but it should adapt easily enough. I even had half a bag of medium oatmeal lurking at the back of the cupboard.
I would have liked to include ground, foraged hazelnuts, but when I cracked the remains of a big heap of nut shells that I gathered over a year ago, it yielded five nuts, of which three were about the size of apple pips. I put a couple of tablespoons of ground almonds in instead. The tweaked recipe ended up looking like this, with ingredients added in the order listed:
- 100g wholemeal flour
- 100g white flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 200g medium-fine oatmeal
- 250g salted butter
- 2 tablespoons sloe pureé
- 2 teaspoons syrup from jar of stem ginger
- 2 tablespoons ground almonds
- 2 tablespoons sugar
My biscuits took a bit longer to cook than the recipe said, and even longer because I kept opening the oven door to check how they were doing. That might have been because the mixture was a little too wet. Anyway, when they were finally cooked, the finished biscuits were excellent.
Sloe biscuits
You wouldn't know they had sloe and ginger in if I hadn't told you. Even Ian likes them, so don't tell him what's in them, will you?
I'm thinking that sloe must be a common plant in Britain. I'd never even heard of it until CatMan and I read the Harry Potter books. Of course we read them in Spanish, and the reason sloe sticks out in my mind is that I must have looked up the word a hundred times.
ReplyDeleteI guess when you don't have any frame of reference for the English word, it's pretty hard to get it's Spanish translation to stick in your brain. I swear we must have had the following exchange at least a dozen times.
Me: What does 'endrino' mean? I know we've looked it up a zillion times...
CatMan: It means 'sloe'
Me: Oh, right. What does 'sloe' mean?
CatMan: Like sloe berries, they're used to make gin.
Me: Oh, right... I don't think I've ever had gin.
Oy!
Anyhow, your cookies look delicious!
Hahaha, yes, I can see that would be a challenge. If it helps, the sloe is the fruit of the blackthorn tree (well, it's more of a shrub), which is similar to the hawthorn, which is also known as may, the flowers of which gave their name to a famous ship.
DeleteTo complicate matters further, gin is not made with sloes, it is flavoured with juniper (that is the only fact I know about juniper). Sloe gin is a liqueur made by pouring gin over sloes and sugar then straining off the sloes a few months later. Since I object to buying an alcoholic drink in order to make an alcoholic drink, I start with sloes, sugar and yeast, and ferment it to get the alcohol. I don't know how similar this is to sloe gin, since I've never actually tried sloe gin, in spite of its popularity amongst hedgerow foragers.