Making Digestives with a Professional Baker

Posted by StevenHWicker on April 19th, 2019

As many of you who follow The Bee’s Knees know, I love to bake. So I was excited to spend some time at Bee’s Knee’s friend Karen’s bakery, Bisousweet Confections. Karen and her team produce amazing biscotti, whoopee pies, doughnut muffins and more. Karen and I have been working in a mentoring group together and got to talking about the deliciousness of English biscuits and we decided it would be fun to make some together.

As Karen loves Digestives (I mean, who doesn’t?) we decided we would start with those. According to Wikipedia “The digestive was first developed in 1839 by two Scottish doctors to aid digestion. The term "digestive" is derived from the belief that they had antacid properties due to the use of sodium bicarbonate when they were first developed. Historically, some producers used diastatic malt extract to "digest" some of the starch that existed in flour prior to baking. Strawberry sugar bowl

We had one recipe from a book I had from The Great British Bake Off (Great British Baking Show in the US) and Karen found an American recipe online. It was so interesting for me to be in a professional, industrial baking environment. Seeing all the equipment and learning about how they make their cookies was fascinating. Needless to say Karen had all the ingredients on hand that we needed for the Digestives. But this is no ordinary kitchen - sacks of flour and sugar, buckets of chocolate chips and mountains of butter all stood ready to be turned into delicious confections.

We began with the American recipe. It was a very easy recipe. Karen used a scale to measure the ingredients. She said they measure all their ingredients this way for the large cookies batches too. She “whooshed” the dough ingredients in a food processor and then rolled out the dough and stamped the cookies. Easy!  Emma bridgewater christmas

As the biscuits were baking we did notice that they were rising up more than we thought they should do. Karen thought this was probably because this recipe had baking soda and baking powder in it. This recipe also called for buttermilk which I thought was interesting. When we got the biscuits out of the oven we thought they didn’t quite look like the real thing so decided to try the other recipe. What do you know? Those came out great. We used the same method to mix them but they had oats in and just baking soda and no buttermilk. We could tell right away that these were going to be better – even me, the amateur baker could tell! And we were right. We melted some chocolate, topped the biscuits and, hey presto, we had delicious homemade Digestives. They were delicious plain too, perfect for dunking in your cup of tea.