Vintage Date Biscuits, my Mother's recipe

For my recipe, click here

Date Rollettes

Dates have become a standard item in most kitchens, being used for all kinds of exotic Middle Eastern dishes to cakes, breads and  desserts. Whilst I generally buy the Medjool dates, for this recipe I think that some of those are too large for biscuits and the quantity of biscuit mixture won’t stretch very far, unless you double it of course. I used a few smaller Medjool dates, but then converted to the packaged Trident brand, which are smaller and standard in size,  however any brand of commercially available dates will do. 

This is my Mother’s recipe, when Medjool dates weren't readily available, and baking them brought back all sorts of fond memories. The challenge though is converting vintage recipes in Imperial measurements to Metric. There are lots of great websites now that assist with the conversion, however I still use the Imperial measurement on my scales so that the quantities are exact. 4 oz butter can weigh slightly differently to 4 oz sugar.

Biscuits smell amazing when they are cooking and don’t take that long to cook. They will keep for over a week in a covered container, however they will never last that long in my house.

Enjoy!

Ingredients:

• 4 oz butter = 1/2 cup = 113.4g
• 8 oz S.R.Flour = 227g
• 18 dates
• 4 oz sugar = 113g
• 1 egg
• Pinch of salt
• 1 cup dessicated coconut
• 1/2 cup milk

Let's cook:

Cream butter and sugar. When well mixed and white in colour, add well beaten egg, then slowly add flour.

Roll a date in a spoonful of mixture. Mould into uniform oblong shapes, or whatever shape you like.

Roll each biscuit into a little milk, and then into desiccated coconut.

Bake in a moderate oven at 180 deg. F. or 375 deg. C. for around 20 minutes depending on the heat of your oven, and until nicely browned. Check their progress after 15 minutes.

An original recipe by Pauline, Happy Retirees Kitchen