Jen's Chocolate Digestives

For Cake Club's guilty pleasures theme, I decided to make chocolate digestives. My reason for making these was simple; I love eating them! 

More like hobnobs than digestives? 

Ingredients

•  4oz/100g wholewheat flour

•  4oz/100g medium oatmeal 

•  2oz/50g soft brown sugar

•  1 teaspoon baking powder

•  pinch of salt

•  4oz/100g butter

•  1 tablespoon of milk to mix

Method

I mixed together all of the dry ingredients and rubbed in the butter. The first time I made these, I used my fingertips and got a dry breadcrumb texture. The second time, for speed I used a food mixer and the dough came out quite wet.

Next, the recipe (by Gary Rhodes), told me to add up to 2 tablespoons of milk to make a soft dough. As my first batch was dry, I did add the recommended measure of milk (2 tablespoons), but for the batch made in the mixer I only added a very small amount, certainly no more than 1 tablespoon. For the record, I preferred the texture of the biscuits with less milk in.

Next I wrapped the dough in clingfilm and refrigerated for 15 minutes to firm the mix.

When rolling the dough, Mr. Rhodes recommended that it should be rolled between two pieces of clingfilm to prevent sticking and cracking. This worked well and would use this technique again.

I rolled the dough to a thickness of about 5 mm and cut out circles using a cutter with a 6 cm diameter. This produced about 11 biscuits.

I used a baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper that I lightly greased with butter to bake the biscuits on. I baked them for about 20 mins at 180ºC (gas mark 4/350ºF).

When cooled, I melted about 200 g of milk chocolate and spread a generous amount on each biscuit. When cooling, I used a metal cake tester to drag vertical and then horizontal lines through the chocolate to make the standard chocolate digestive pattern. At this point I realised I had been a bit too generous with the chocolate - the lines were much more effective on the biscuits with a thinner layer! 

I then popped the finished biscuits in the fridge to completely set the chocolate, and then stored them in a plastic container at room temperature.