This is another recipe from Annabel Crabb’s Special Delivery cookbook. These are fairly sweet and more of a gift biscuit (in keeping with the theme of the cookbook) than an everyday sort of biscuit. You should be able to substitute any combination of dried fruit, nuts and chocolate you like – the original recipe uses white chocolate chips with the apricot and macadamia nuts, but I am a little disapproving of white chocolate so I used dark, which worked really well. They’re wonderfully chewy and the apricot and macadamia combination is delicious.

ingredients:
290g plain flour
3 tsps baking powder
110g caster sugar
175g unsalted butter
200g brown sugar
1 egg and 1 egg yolk, beaten together
1 tsp vanilla essence
125g dried apricots, chopped
120g macadamias, roughly chopped
200g chocolate chips

Melt the butter and brown sugar together in a small saucepan and let it cool down a little. Preheat the oven to 180C.

If you are in favour of sifting flour, then sift the flour and baking powder into a mixing bowl. If you’re me and unconcerned with such niceties, dump the flour and baking powder into a bowl and give it a stir. Add the caster sugar. Pour in the slightly cooled butter and brown sugar mixture, and stir the mixture well. Stir in the beaten eggs, vanilla, apricots, macadamias and chocolate chips.

Line two trays with baking paper, and then scoop out 3cm-ish balls of the mixture, pressing them onto the trays. I used a coffee scoop which seemed to work well. Bake the biscuits for about 10-12 minutes, depending on how big your biscuits are – when they’re set on top, they should be fine. If you want them more crunchy than chewy, leave them in for a minute or two longer.