Anzac Biscuits: What My Grandmother Knew That I Had to Learn the Hard Way

Anzac biscuits are one of those things that seem simple until they aren't. Oats, golden syrup, coconut, butter, flour. A method so forgiving you could make them with a toddler on your hip. And yet.

I grew up eating them. My mother made them, and her mother before her, and for most of my childhood I assumed this was knowledge that would simply transfer. That I would, at some point, become a person who made very good Anzac biscuits.

It turns out the senior recipe tester got there first.

I don't know how this happened. I make many other things. He makes Anzac biscuits, and he makes them better than me. They come out at exactly the right height, not too flat, not cakey, with that particular chewy texture in the middle that means you've timed them correctly and haven't been overcautious with the golden syrup. Mine, in the early years, varied. Sometimes they were perfect. Sometimes they were more of a concept.

The kitchen has since absorbed this truth.

Why Anzac biscuits matter

The name comes from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (the ANZAC troops who served in the First World War). The biscuits were made on the home front during the war, when eggs were scarce, and women were looking for something that could survive being shipped to soldiers without spoiling. The combination of golden syrup, rolled oats, and coconut meant they held well, which was entirely the point.

The recipe hasn't changed much in the century since. Which is either testament to how good it was to begin with, or to the wisdom of not messing with a national institution (unlike the Tim Tam which now seems to come in myriad flavours... but that's a topic for another debate).

Anzac Day falls on 25 April, the anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli in 1915. Dawn services, the Last Post, two-up in the pub car park. And, in a lot of Australian kitchens, biscuits.

What makes a great one

There are two camps on this and I will be direct: the chewy camp is correct.

A good Anzac biscuit should have some resistance. The edges can be golden and slightly crisp. The centre should yield, not crumble, not snap. If you can pick one up and it breaks across the middle the moment you apply any pressure, it's been in the oven too long, or the golden syrup ratio is off.

Height matters too. An Anzac that's spread too flat misses the point. The contrast between the crisp edge and the yielding centre is what makes the thing worth eating. You want a biscuit that looks like it has some confidence about itself.

The way to achieve this: don't flatten them before they go in. Let the oven do the work. Pull them out when they're golden, not when they're browned. They'll keep cooking on the tray.

The recipe

Makes 18-20 biscuits. Preparation time 15 minutes or less.

Ingredients

•       1 cup plain flour

•       1 cup rolled oats

•       1 cup brown sugar

•       ½ cup desiccated coconut

•       125g butter

•       2 tablespoons golden syrup

•       1 tablespoon water

•       ½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

Method

1.    Add the flour into a large bowl and add the rolled oats, brown sugar, and coconut. Give them a stir to combine.

2.    Melt the butter in a small saucepan over low heat. Add the golden syrup and water, then stir through the bicarbonate of soda. It will foam up briefly. That's correct. Keep going.

3.    Pour the liquid into the dry ingredients and mix until everything comes together into a cohesive dough.

4.    Use a small ice cream scoop to portion the dough onto a greased baking tray. This gives you evenly sized biscuits without the fiddling, and it is significantly faster than rolling individual portions by hand. I say this not as a professional tip but as someone who has rolled many individual portions by hand and found the scoop to be a considerably better use of her time.

5.    Do not flatten them. The oven will do that work, and you want them to retain some height.

6.    Bake at 175°C for 15 to 20 minutes. Pull them out when they're golden. Not browned. Golden. They will continue cooking on the tray after you remove them, and they will harden as they cool. If they look slightly underdone in the oven, they're probably exactly right.

A note on the golden syrup: use the two tablespoons and stop there. More golden syrup means more spread and a crunchier biscuit. If you're in the chewy camp (and you should be), resist the urge.

If you want fresh-baked Anzacs whenever the mood strikes: roll the entire batch of uncooked dough into a log, wrap it carefully in greaseproof paper, and put it in the freezer. When you want biscuits, cut slices from the log and bake them straight from frozen. They won't have quite the same shape as the scooped version, but they will be delicious. And you will have fresh Anzac biscuits at approximately 20 minutes' notice for the rest of winter, which is, frankly, a very good situation to be in.

This recipe doubles beautifully. Given that Anzac biscuits keep well in an airtight container, doubling the batch is, in my view, always the correct decision.

The version we make at Dinner on the Table

Our Anzac biscuits are, in truth, modelled on the senior recipe tester's. Chewy, not too flat, with that golden syrup depth that means one is never quite enough.

Made in small batches (one bowl, real butter, proper golden syrup) the same way they've always been made. No shortcuts that change what they actually are.

Three generations of women in my family made Anzac biscuits. My grandmother, my mother, and now me, albeit with a little guidance from an unexpected direction.

Some traditions are worth keeping. This is one of them.