Cakes and Quail

Living the frugal life as we are, I feel the need to make sure there is a constant supply of cakes or biscuits in the house to keep everyone on course and stop them succumbing to temptation in the supermarket or newsagents. Sometimes I can be too successful though and feel that I am having to bake every day. On Monday I made a dozen fairy cakes and about 8 iced buns, by teatime this is all that was left of the buns

 and this is what was left of the buns, although I had managed to get two of them into hiding in the freezer.

 

It is all well and good people enjoying what I bake but I have other things to do in my life than to be baking constantly. What I needed to find was a recipe for a biscuit that was just okay, good enough to have with a cup of tea or a sweet snack but not good enough to disappear in one sitting. Of course when looking through recipe books there aren't many that are labelled 'Not Too Nice Biscuits' or described as 'the family will be unenthusiastic about these fellers and leave them in the biscuit tin' but I succeeded. Here they are the Crunchy Oatmeal Biscuits

and they have the added bonus of using up 2 oz of All Bran Golden Crunch cereal which we received as a free sample and didn't really like. I was worried that my scheme had gone awry when Rosie declared they were tasty but all is well, two days later there is still a mass of them in the biscuit tin. I was going to write up the recipe here but think it is unlikely that anyone except me will be looking for not too exciting biscuits. If you do want it leave a comment below and I will post it another day.
It seems only fair when talking about cakes that I should report my failures as well as successes. Yesterday I made some flapjack but somehow got the proportions of ingredients wrong. Rosie says it is like oaty toffee

It tastes good, like buttery toffee but it is so hard, each piece has to be sucked for a while before it becomes soft enough to bite. Delicious in its own way but not what you expect from flapjack.

Now unlike the biscuits I feel my quail news is really exciting enough to deserve a post of their own but I couldn't pass up the chance to use that title, so here is a trailer for my next post.