Orange jumbles
“Lay out your fine china, cover up the piano legs and invite the vicar over for a genteel afternoon tea of these jaunty English cakes and biscuits.”
- 100g butter, softened
- 125g sugar
- 60g flour
- grated rind and juice of 1 orange
- 1 drop cochineal*
- 120g slivered almonds
*or substitute the same volume of blood-orange juice for the regular orange juice
The orange jumbles came from the chapter, "In the cook's absence". Lady Jekyll advises that the biscuits should be "faintly pink as the underneath of a young mushroom". In her recipe she uses a drop of cochineal, but in my case I use blood-orange juice. I have changed the imperial measures to metric and adjusted the method for modern practices.
Method
Preheat oven to 180C. Line 2 oven trays with paper.
Combine butter and sugar
until pale and creamy either in a food processor or an electric mixer. Add the
juice (and cochineal if using) and flour in alternate lots. Stir in the rind and
the slivered almonds.
Spoon teaspoonfuls of mixture well apart on trays. Bake
10-15 minutes until dark at the edges and well spread. Remove trays from oven,
leave for 10 seconds and using a flexible metal spatula, slip the biscuits onto
a cake rack to cool completely.
Store in an airtight tin as these biscuits
soften quickly and do not like a humid environment.
Makes about 30
biscuits.
