Meal Plan 8 – Coconut Biscuits, 3p each, or 61p for a 24 biscuit batch

Jan 30, 2015 | 7 comments

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These are from meal plan 8. Use them whenever you need the calories.

coconut biscuits

200g self raising flour, value 1.5kg/45p, 6p
200g sugar, Asda 1kg/59p, 12p
100g vegetable oil, 1 litre/£1.25, 12p
80g creamed coconut, chopped up fine 200g/76p, 30p

for 24 biscuits from the batch, 3p each, 119 calories, 1g protein, 6g fat, 14g carb

for the whole batch, 61p, 2847 calories, 26g protein, 148g fat, 346g carbs

Heat the oven to 180C fan/ 200C/ 400F/ Gas Mark 6
Super simple, just tip all the ingredients into a bowl and mix well together. Now add 2-4 tblsps water to make a loose dough. Using your hands, scoop up a walnut sized piece of dough and roll it in your hands. While still in your hands, flatten slightly. Put it on a baking tray and repeat until all the mixture is used up. You will get about 24 biscuits, depending on how big you make them. Bake for 15 minutes or so, until golden.
I used 2 baking trays to put them on, well spaced apart as they spread out quite a lot. You could make half a batch at a time if you like. It will cost more to bake them, but they might last longer. Fresh baked goodies are unbelieveably moreish

These came out beautifully crisp, lovely and short, with a hint of coconut.

This recipe can be flexed literally hundreds of different ways. As well as the coconut, you could add a little vanilla extract. Add some dessicated coconut, or press it onto the outside of the biscuit before baking. Using value milk, white or plain chocolate, chop some up to make chips and add to the mix, amount varying on how chocolatey you want them. Swap out a big scoop of flour for cocoa to make rich chocolate biscuits. Add some lemon/lime/orange zest. Add smarties, jelly tots or m&m’s. Use some chopped preserved ginger, and/or ginger powder, use muscovado sugar, Demerara or jaggery. Add some cinnamon or mixed spice.

On a savoury vibe, add a couple of tblsps of tomato purée, or half a tsp each of turmeric, cumin and coriander, or any other combination of spice you want. Add some fine chopped chilli, and/or garlic.  Or add some fennel seeds, sesame seeds or pumpkin seeds.

Drizzle the baked biscuits with icing, melted chocolate, or for the savoury ones, sweet chilli. Just before eating for the chilli, or they’ll go soft.

I’ve used oil here as we have nothing else available on Meal Plan 8,  but that could be swapped for spread or butter, or even dripping from the joint for a deliciously different savoury biscuit.  If you use a solid fat, you will need to add more liquid to get the dough.

And there are many, many other combinations. Have a look at what you’ve got in the cupboard and use your imagination and see what you can come up with.


7 Comments

7 Comments

  1. furbysmum

    Sometimes I don’t fancy the precise dish you present but I really appreciate all the other creative suggestions you give for that recipe which means the idea can so easily be adapted to what one has in the larder and will enjoy eating. I really value this feature of your blog since I am not so imaginative myself.

  2. Lesley

    The ginger ones sound very yum 🙂

  3. Pamela Dungar

    Lesley, the biscuits are amazing. The first batch followed the basic recipe and the second batch had crystallised ginger added. Both were moreish.

  4. Lesley

    Pamela, ooh, how deliciously naughty, a sweet breakfast. My mouth is watering now!

  5. Lesley

    Joy, creamed coconut is a very concentrated coconut cream, and an even more concentrated coconut milk. If the Copha tastes of coconut, that might work, but it sounds like what we call coconut oil – used for cooking, with no taste of coconut. You could try using dessicated coconut in these biscuits, and coconut cream in the other meal 8 recipes. The cream and milk will be too wet for these biscuits.
    Creamed coconut is used a lot in curries, with the Asian population in Oz, I would have thought that it would be in demand, maybe its called something else there?

  6. Pamela Dungar

    I use lots of your recipes, some I tweak to use what I have. This one is sending me into the kitchen to make some NOW. Sweet breakfast here I come.

  7. joy

    I don’t think we have creamed coconut in Oz, I looked it up on wiki as I’d never heard of it. What could you use as a substitute? We have Copha which says it’s hydrogenated coconut oil, would that be near enough, we use it melted as the fat in no bake slices.

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