Short and Tweet 3 Challenge: Cheese and black pepper buttons or Buttermilk oatcakes
This has been a week of landline failures and power outages. As my mobile had been returned because of a screen fault and subsequently lost by the repairers it was also an unexpectedly protracted tumble into a communications black hole. Thankfully, I had both Cheese & black pepper buttons and Buttermilk oatcakes from Dan Lepard’s Short & Sweet (pp 258-9) to sustain me in those trying times when you can’t communicate with a telecoms company because you have no telecoms.
Somewhat belatedly, I offer a compilation of our various attempts at Cheese and black pepper buttons (with some variation) and the Buttermilk oatcakes. As with the other challenges, bakers’ details offer insight into preferences relating to sweetness of the oatcake and its texture: has the prevalence of hard, crisp oatcakes shaped our expectations of them?
Jo of Zeb Bakes baked the Buttermilk (Yoghurt) Oatcakes. Jo used yoghurt and reduced the sugar content. Like me, she found the mixture a challenge to shape into oatcake rounds but (unlike me) she contrived an elegant shape to them with some patience and a scone cutter used as a mould.
BakeCakeCrumbs of Cake, Crumbs and Cooking sent along Buttermilk Oatcakes - Short and Tweet. Another baker who found these oatcakes quite sweet and soft-textured the report is that that were enjoyable: “I’m quite pleased with them, because although they will go well with cheese and chutney, they will also be tasty on their own”.
Paul (Keeper9) has baked the Cheese and black pepper buttons previously and enjoyed them so much that he now has his own variation which increases the size and includes bacon: Cheese and blacksticks biscuits. The general feeling in my household is that this sounds like an excellent variation but if I were to bake it then follow my usual practice of giving away the baked goods then there’s a distinct possibility that there would be unpleasant scenes.
Louise McLaren of Please Do Not Feed the Animals! opted for Cheesy Buttons. She describes her neatly-shaped buttons as a “classy little nibble…[and] rather moreish” alongside being so easy to put together that they feel destined to become a regular bake item.
Tony Inga of Pane Artigiano embraced New Territory: The World of Savoury Biscuits for this challenge and baked both. I don’t know if Tony used buttermilk (rather than yoghurt) and if he tracked down fine oatmeal rather than ground down porridge oats but his oatcakes look thinner than some other examples and he describes it as a “lace-like biscuit…[which] also delivered a lovely crunchy texture”. 
Tony describes the Cheese and black pepper buttons as a “sublime snack”: which is an admirable outcome from a baking session.
Misky of Misk Cooks presented the delectable combination of Buttermilk Oatcakes and Roasted Applesauce which rather sounds like something Herbert the Lion would have enjoyed. Misk used 3 types of cheese and baked 3 varieties of oatcake (there is a very useful series of photographs of intermediate stages in the mixing and baking and a charming shot of the oatcakes and applesauce). Misk’s verdict: “Dan is right in saying that these are nothing like the store bought oatcakes. They’re a combination of digestive biscuits and traditional oatcakes”.
I used natural yoghurt and Morningflake oatmeal for my oatcakes: the oatmeal was medium, ground finer by me. The dough was very wet and I left it to stand for 20 minutes before attempting to spoon it out into biscuit shapes. Like others, I found these a tad sweet although they made a good backdrop to a sharp cheese and piccalilli.
For various reasons, I had to leave the Cheese and black pepper buttons dough in the fridge for 2 hours before dividing and shaping into buttons (Cheddar cheese and Lidl Parmesan). As ever, there is a lack of attention to detail that means mine aren’t as nicely shaped as those of other bakers. Nonetheless, they were so delightful that the majority of them had to be distributed rapidly to other households before temptation could overwhelm us.
If I’ve omitted anybody, please let me know in the comments and I’ll update this post.
I’ve learned a lot from other people’s reported experiences when baking the oatcakes in particular. I look forward to this week’s challenge for 20 November: Top tea cakes pp 88-9. If you blog about your experience with this recipe, please post links in the comments or tweet pictures or links to @foodcraftspace or @evidencematters using the hashtag #shortandtweet - Thank you. It’s the same procedure if you don’t blog but just post a photograph of your work. Please send the links by 8pm 20 November.
Schedule for the #shortandtweet November challenge (December schedule).
Outline for #shortandtweet challenge and its conditions.
Thank you to everyone for taking part. I look forward to seeing everyone’s Top tea cakes.
