How to make Oat Cakes, a holiday snack that is remarkably low in food

I developed a taste for Oat Cakes earlier this year.  You can buy excellent oat cakes at your corner store. Walkers, purveyors of fine shortbreads, make them, but they are not even the only authetic scottish company to distribute them internationally. However, there are two problems with store bought oat cakes – firstly they cost 3-5$ for a 400 gram packet. The second being they are surprisingly high in fat (several grams per cracker). You can avoid all th is unpleasantness by baking them yourself – and they are remarkably easy to produce in bulk.

Ingrediants:

2 cups oats

1 tbsp oil or melted butter or bacon fat

pinch salt

Blender

Boiling water

a 350″ oven, or 325 convection. Don’t ask me about metric.

Alright, so the blender isn’t really an ingredient, but it’s required to turn the oats into a meal. You could use quick oats, but if you don’t blend them you will end up with remarkably granulated cakes (they’ll still taste good). You can experiment with different blending times, the times I’ve just left the blender on and went to check my email has produces the nicest cakes.

Once you have your oatmeal of desired fineness, place it in a bowl and add a pinch of salt and the tbsp of fat (I use oil, but I presume bacon fat would produce the best results). I have forgone this step and you still get oat cakes, and they are pretty much the same. Still, it feels wrong not to put any fat in them. You could try to double or triple the oil to try to further approach store-bought texture, but since you usually eat them with cheese or jam these seems unnecessarily rich.

Next, add boiling water from a kettle little by little, stirring, until you have a dough. Next, kneed the dough until its a dough and not just oatmeal with water in it.

Place the dough on a floured surface and roll it out to the disired thinness and cut, ideally using some kind of cookie cutter, into rounds. Do not cut them into triangles, nor squares. Hexagons are right out. Place the rounds on a greased sheet and bake in a moderate oven for 25 minutes.

When you think they are done, take them out and look at the bottom of a few cakes, there should be some moisture left. Place them on a drying rack to cool (if you do not have a drying rack, you should let them to dry upside down so the underneath moisture can escape).

Now that you are an expert at oat-cake production, feel free to quit your job and start a cottage industry producing food from the 18th century. Seriously though, the recipe can be doubled ad infinitum, but I find it unproductive to put more than 2 cups of oats in the blender at once.  This doesn’t mean that I didn’t make an 16 cup batch yesterday.