By Michelle Shearer

I seem to always have a pot of leftover brown rice sitting there, looking at me, challenging me :”Whatcha gonna do with me, huh? HUH?”.  I’ll knock up a Nasi Goreng, or we’ll chuck it in our scrambled eggs to beef it up a bit or sometimes I just feed it to the chicken because I’ve gotten sick to the back teeth of looking at it.

One day I looked at it and thought to myself “biscuits”.   I think about biscuits a lot to be honest.  Probably an unhealthy amount.  Biscuits +brown rice well, the brown rice thing would utterly negate the biscuit thing.

The result: Look, I’ll be honest with you, they were a bit ‘funny’.  That is, funny:  peculiar, not funny: ha ha.  They were more of a biscake.  Do you know what I mean? A biscuit but with distinctly cake-y qualities.  They reminded me of the good old fashioned rock cakes of yesteryear back in England when I was growing up.  The kids actually found them divine and I found myself feeling smug at discovering a slightly less orthodox way of using up brown rice.

Give ’em a crack and adapt this recipe – you could really go to town.

Ingredients

Makes about 40

4 cups cooked  brown rice
2 cups plain flour
3 tspns baking powder
230g Butter
1.5 cups desiccated coconut
1.5 cups brown sugar (or coconut sugar)
4 tspns cinnamon
2 tspns vanilla essence
2 eggs, beaten.

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees and prepare your cookie sheet.
2. Beat together the butter and sugar until it’s all creamy.
3. Add the eggs (a little at a time) and vanilla essence and beat together well.
4. Sift all the dry ingredients together and pour into butter and egg mixture, mix together and then fold in the cooked rice and coconut. Drop cookie dough from a wet teaspoon on your cookie sheet.
5. Bake for about half an hour or until your ‘biscakies’ are a lovely golden brown in color.

You might add currants or sultanas or chocolate chips or something?