School snacks and sweet treats

How good is weekend baking!  We are heading to a picnic with friends this evening so I am cooking roast beef and potato salad to go with fresh rolls and a garden salad for our feast.  The house smells beautiful!  Lazy days are few and far between so I am doing a bit of baking: home made LCM bars (thanks for the recipe @BrendonWalker) and the most scrumptious biscuit ever, Russian Tea Cookies.

LCM bars

• 8 cups rice bubbles
• 1 tin condensed milk
• small pack of choc chips

1. Grease and line with baking paper a slice tin, put on oven at 160C
2. Mix everything together in a big bowl
3. Spread mixture evenly in tins and smooth down
4. Bake for about 20 mins at 160C (keep your eye on them I expect they are easy to overcook)
5. Let them cool in the tin then slice into bars and store in an air tight container

Note that I probably should have put mine in one tin rather than two as they ended up too thin and really didn't work out well as they were not thick enough to slice (see we all have kitchen failures from time to time!).  Another friend swears by a slightly different recipe for these which you can find here.

Russian tea cookies
Alas this is not my (or a friend's) recipe to publish.  But I can guarantee they are the yummiest biscuit you will ever eat.  Reading is one of my greatest pleasures, and one of my most re-read series of novels of all time is the Paullina Simons Bronze Horseman trilogy.

If you have read these three novels (The Bronze Horseman, The Bridge to Holy Cross and The Summer Garden) you will be familiar with the main character, Tatiana's love for food.  In fact such a huge theme that food and cooking plays in these books (and one assumes the author's too), has no doubt resulted in the "companion" Tatiana's Table cook book.  In this little gem of a book you can find the recipe for Russian tea cookies (on page 102).   This recipe alone is worth purchasing this book, or at the very least making a trip to the library. A lovely light, sweet biscuit with a hint of chewiness and

Note that the recipe uses walnuts for coating the biscuits, in my opinion the biscuits are just as yum without the walnuts and it means you can send them to school too.