Flapjacks

My mother never baked anything until several years after I moved out of the house. With the exception of a few school picnics for which she created some very damp meringues, her food production was limited to one-step “dishes” like grated carrots, frozen TV dinners, and toast. But for some reason, with both of her children away at college, she has become a mass-producer of all kinds of homemade jams, cakes, and ice creams.

When it comes to baked goods, my mother has mainly stuck to her English roots, with butter-infused recipes that my grandmother has always made expertly. But although my mother has come to embrace culinary projects with multiple steps and ingredients, she is still reluctant to actually follow recipes, even when they are right in front of her. This is why each batch of one of her signature dishes, oat cookies called flapjacks in England (nothing like the pancakes we Americans associate with that name), turns out radically differently.

Flapjacks are a bar cookie (although in England they’re “biscuits,” of course), typically made with rolled oats, butter, brown sugar, and sometimes a sticky binder like honey or golden syrup. Beyond that, people often add nuts, dried fruits, or chocolate, and they can be made crispier, stickier, or chewier depending on your preference. We tend to mix in whatever cereal needs to be finished, for a crunchier effect. If you cook like my mother, you can achieve all these effects in turn just by “following” a single recipe.

A word of warning: the combination of fat and sugar in these cookies creates a flavor that speaks to our evolutionarily encoded desire for, well, fat and sugar, and they can be so addictive that you find yourself totally incapable of not eating an entire plate of them. You start to feel like you have ingested a stick of butter (and you’re probably well on your way), but if there are more flapjacks in front of you, or even in a tin on the top shelf that’s meant for a party tomorrow, you simply can’t say no. I’ve seen it happen many times – my mother will offer around a plate of seemingly innocent oat bars, and suddenly people don’t know what’s happening to them. I call it Flapjack Madness.

My mother’s recipe follows, with my interpretation of her personal techniques in parentheses.

English Flapjacks

4 oz butter

2 oz rolled oats

2 oz. self-raising flour (my mother uses pancake mix)

4 oz. brown sugar

1 tbsp. molasses or golden syrup

3 oz. any kind of crushed corn flakes or cereal (whatever cereal people haven’t been eating fast enough)

2-3 oz. raisins and/or sultanas

2-3 oz. nuts (walnuts, almonds, pecans, hazelnuts) to taste

Melt the butter and mix with molasses and sugar. (Perhaps it doesn’t seem buttery enough. Add a few more tablespoons.) Stir in rest of ingredients. (Forget whether you’ve added the flour. It should be obvious, but somehow…it isn’t. Oh well, nothing wrong with them being extra buttery. Add some more cereal just in case; no one likes this kind for breakfast anyway.) Spread in greased square 9-inch pan. The trick is to spread it thinly enough to get crisp without disintegrating into crumbs. (But don’t worry about it too much, crumbs are still edible.)

Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes. (Or take them out when you suddenly remember you put them in before doing several loads of laundry, after you realize you have no idea what time you started anyway.) Score into squares about 5 minutes after taking out of the oven. (Observe results. Are they crunchy? syrupy? oozing with butter and golden syrup? Don’t dwell on how the choices you made on this particular occasion might have affected the outcome. Then you’d learn something to apply to the next batch, and that would make life less interesting. Just eat them.)