Sunday 27 March 2011

Pale Malt Cookies


Cookies made with pale malt.

This recipe gave me 10 fat cookies, crisp on the outside and chewy in the middle:

150g unsalted butter
85g caster sugar
85g soft brown sugar
1 egg
One drop of vanilla extract
200g plain flour
Big pinch of salt
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
80g pale malt (with a little reserved)
20g oats

Cream the butter and sugar in a mixer. Add the egg and mix. Add the vanilla extract and then mix all the remaining ingredients (if you want to crush the malt in a pestle and mortar then you can - I didn’t and liked the texture). If the mix gets too sticky then add a few drops of water (or beer!). Butter some baking trays, spread them out, sprinkle some more malt on top and bake for about 15 minutes at 170C.


These are delicious! The malt has a nutty and light sweetness to it which works so well with the buttery cookie, adding great extra flavour and texture. If any brewers or homebrewers have any spare malt (of course you have!) then I recommend baking these. They also work really well with beer on the side.

I’ve now got a few other recipes I want to try with malt as an ingredient, so I’d better find a nearby brewery who can spare a few scoops... I’d also love to try this recipe with dark malt and add chocolate chips.

This idea was inspired by a box of maris otter malt biscuits which I received in the post from Little Rose Bakery. There were two different kinds, one semi-sweet and one savoury, and they were so good I wanted to make my own.


6 comments:

  1. Roast malt can be quite intense, but if you're the sort of person who likes chewing coffee beans it might work. Make the cookies a bit smaller for an austere, severely roasty cookie. Then half-coat them with chocolate. Or perhaps use a few speckles of dark malt in a pale cookie instead of chocolate chips.

    ReplyDelete
  2. These sound great, I'm making these today!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dry Malt Extract works nicely in a Bread Mix, bit of Treacle and replaced the water with Boiled and cooled Stout :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Is the malt whole and unused or spent grain after the brewing process. I can certainly see myself baking cookies after the mash on brewday.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Barm - You are right. Without too much malt it could give a bite like very dark chocolate or coffee, which could work with the buttery sweetness?

    pdtnc - Nice!

    TaleOfAle - It was just crushed malt but I like the idea of spent grain. You'd probably want a bit of extra sugar and butter to balance it out.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This calls for an experiment. One batch with crushed malt and another with spent grain.

    ReplyDelete