Tonight was “Heritage Night” at Minime’s school, and the kids each signed up to bring a food from the land o’ their heritage. Now somehow we missed signup day initially, so my plans to celebrate my Irish heritage with Irish coffee for the kids went down the drain (all school functions are better with coffee and whiskey, children!).
England got taken. I wanted to fake being Italian so I could just make spaghetti, but that was taken as well. We ended up with
Scotland, as some relative or other is a Scot, so fine and dandy, it can’t be too hard to come up with something.
I started researching recipes, and you can only imagine the foods from the country that brought us haggis are a little scary. I found lots of recipes involving animal guts and whiskey that I opted to skip, so I thought perhaps we should look for dessert recipes instead…and found a lot of recipes with fruit and whiskey. Whiskey is an important part o’ my pale heritage!
Finally I tracked down a recipe for a sweet treat that didn’t involve sheep guts or alcohol, and woohooooooooo, the results turned out really, really good and it’s very easy!
Oat Cakes
8 tablespoons butter
¼ cup sugar
2 cups quick cooking oatmeal
¼ cup white corn syrup
Melt the butter in a 10 inch skillet over medium heat. Stir in sugar with a wooden spoon. Let it bubble together for 20 seconds, taking care not to let it burn. Add oatmeal and stir over heat until it is golden brown. Remove from heat, dump contents into a big bowl and stir in corn syrup.(Pause to celebrate your heritage and drink some whiskey.) Pack mixture into 12 muffin tins, dividing equally. Really smoosh (we’re not smushing, we’re smooooooshing) it down so they stick together.Refrigerate at least 3 hours, or freeze 20-30 minutes. Loosen by running knife around edges, gently slide out.
Now, at this point, the oat cakes are nice tasty little cookies, sweet and good with a cold glass o’ (soy!) milk. Or whiskey.
But if you want to kick it up a notch Kat-style when you make them, get some mini chocolate chips. Throw a ¼ cup of chocolate chips in the bottom of the bowl before you dump your hot buttery oats in the bowl. Throw your buttery oats on top of the chips, then throw in your corn syrup as above, and toss another ¼ cup of those mini chips on top of the warm sticky mess and stir. Pack into the muffin tins and yadda yadda yadda as directed above. Super good, I swear, whether you’re wearing a kilt or not.