Oat Rounds, a Not-Too-Sweet Treat

These crisp little numbers strike a middle ground between cookie and cracker, another take-with-tea-or-coffee-treat like shortbread or a scone. They are ridiculously easy to make and the ingredients are common pantry items.

I have no idea where this recipe came from. I found it in my computer where it merely looked like this: “2oz su, 4oz bu, 4oz oats, 2oz fl. Cr tog bu su add fl oats knead roll cut – 20 mins.” All that is shorthand for sugar, butter, flour, ounces, cream together butter sugar, add flour, oats, etc. and is the kind of note taking I do when someone is telling me a recipe out loud. Wouldn’t it have been nice if I had noted who?

The recipe reminds me of a couple oatcake recipes I saw in my former mother-in-law’s recipe collection. She was a Cape Breton girl, from Port Hawkesbury, and took a few Scottish recipes with her when she moved to Niagara with her husband to begin married life and start a family of three boys. Then she brought them with her to Belfast, Maine.

The recipe is probably a pretty standard oat cake or oat round. If you hanker for something a little sweeter, consider making sandwich cookies by putting icing between two of them. Or serve with cheese instead for a savory version. Tender, oaty, a little sweet, buttery. Lovely little item.

I weighed my ingredients according to my shorthand notations, then put them into our regular measuring cups.

Oat Rounds
Serves: Makes 20 2-inch rounds.
 
Ingredients
  • ¼ cup sugar
  • ¼ cup, or half a stick of butter
  • ½ cup flour
  • 1 cup rolled oats
Instructions
  1. Heat the oven to 325 and grease a baking sheet or line it with parchment paper.
  2. Cream together the sugar and butter until it very smooth.
  3. Beat in the flour, and then the oats, and mix until the dough cleans the sides of the bowl.
  4. Pat or roll out the dough about a quarter inch thick, then cut rounds with a cookie cutter or cut the dough into squares or bars.
  5. Place on baking sheet and bake for twenty to twenty-five minutes until golden brown.

 

Sandy Oliver

About Sandy Oliver

Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.