Romany Creams

With Alice back in London, I was looking for something to try and found a recipe for Romany Creams in the Baptist Collection Biscuit Book compiled by the ladies of the Port Shepstone Baptist Church. For those who don’t know them, Romany Creams are one of the classic South African special occasion biscuits – a chocolate and coconut sandwich held together by chocolate icing, something that ex-pat South Africans import all over the world.

My first attempt didn’t turn out very well. The recipe calls for 125 ml of boiling water, added with the coconut, and then the addition of extra flour until the mixture leaves the bowl and ingredients don’t stick to your hand but, when I had added almost half as much flour again as was in the original recipe it still seemed too soft.

Discretion being the better part of valour, I decided to go ahead to the baking and see what happened. The result tasted pretty good but looked a bit anaemic and collapsed on the baking tray so, with advice from Alice, I decided to make some adjustments. For the second batch, then, I added 50 grams of dark chocolate to darken the mix and changed the method slightly to add the water last on the basis that I could stop when the texture was right.

This time round, I also decided to check the quantity conversions so measured the ingredients and then weighed them and found, by chance, at least part of the problem last week. Two cups of flour turned out to weigh more than the 240 grams in the recipe – closer to 400 grams, in fact – and, with that adjustment, the texture of the mixture was just about right and I ended up adding the full 125 ml of water.

The result was the recipe below, which turned out well in both texture and flavour. I will try this again in a couple of weeks time and I shall try substituting the cocoa with a hundred grams of dark chocolate to strengthen the flavour and colour and I’ll keep you updated on the result.

Romany Creams (Gloria Tarboton)

INGREDIENTS
250g Butter
50g Dark Chocolate
250g Castor Sugar
400g Flour
60 ml Cocoa
5 ml Baking Powder
3 ml salt
200g Desiccated coconut
3 ml baking powder
125 ml boiling water
Chocolate for filling.

METHOD

Cream the butter and sugar and add the melted chocolate. Add the sifted dry ingredients and then the coconut. Then add as much of the water as necessary so that the mixture rolls into a ball without sticking to the hands or the sides of the bowl. Put teaspoons-full (or use a biscuit maker) onto a greased baking tray and bake at 180˚C (350˚F), Gas mark 4 for 15 minutes. When cool sandwich together with melted chocolate.