Contents

Related

cookie-recipes

recipes

food

Rolled oats, coconut, golden syrup and no egg. The story that they were posted to soldiers at Gallipoli is mostly retrospective — the recipe under that name appears in Australian and New Zealand cookbooks from about 1919 — but the reason the story sticks is real enough: with no egg and a high sugar syrup they keep for weeks and survive a long journey.

In Australia the name is protected under the Protection of Word "Anzac" Regulations; a commercial baker needs permission to use it, and the biscuit must be a biscuit rather than a cookie.

What makes it work
  • Golden syrup, not honey or corn syrup. It is an invert sugar with a faint bitterness from the refining process, and it is what makes the biscuit chew rather than snap. See Sugar and sugar in baking.
  • The soda goes into the melted butter and syrup, not the flour. It fizzes on contact and that reaction is what aerates a doughs with no egg in it.
  • Chewy or crisp is a bake-time decision, not a recipe one. 12 minutes gives chew; 18 gives a biscuit that shatters. Same dough.
  • Rolled oats only. Instant oats are pre-cut and turn the biscuit pasty; see oats.

Ingredients

Makes about 24.

  • 100 g rolled oats
  • 150 g all-purpose flour
  • 100 g desiccated coconut
  • 150 g light brown sugar
  • 125 g unsalted butter
  • 60 g golden syrup
  • 5 g baking soda
  • 2 tbsp boiling water
  • 3 g fine salt

Method

Mix the oats, flour, coconut, sugar and salt in a large bowl.

Melt the butter and golden syrup together over low heat. Dissolve the soda in the boiling water and stir it into the hot butter — it will foam up dramatically. Pour that straight into the dry ingredients and mix until every oat is coated.

Roll 25 g balls, flatten them slightly, and space them well: these spread more than they look as though they will. Bake 160 °C / 325 °F, 12 minutes for chewy, 16–18 for crisp.

They are soft when they come out and firm as they cool. Leave them on the tray five minutes before moving.

Notes
  • Keeps a month in an airtight tin, and is one of very few cookies genuinely better in week two.
  • If they spread into one sheet, the butter was too hot when it met the dry ingredients. Let the pan cool two minutes next time.
  • The New Zealand version usually skips the coconut. Both countries claim the original and neither can prove it.

Elsewhere on the site

Method and theory: Cookie recipes · cookies · oats · sugar in baking

Nearby: oatmeal lace cookies · digestive biscuits · monster cookies