Something savoury

The whole idea of tradition runs rife at Christmas, don't you think? Most families have their own little celebrations to be replicated but for us the last few years have seen a run of 'one-off' Christmases with a departure from anything we had seen and done before. While learning from this that what matters is what happens, whether or not it has happened many times before, and to make the most of each moment and those you spend it with, I found myself nostalgically turning to the recipe folder my mother had compiled for me when I first set up home. I knew that in there I would find some of my childhood seasonal favourites and sure enough there were some of the biscuits and slices she used to bake in large quantities. What caught my eye though was a recipe, tucked away at the back under 'Sundries.' Flippies! How could I have forgotten about flippies for so long; it must be years since I made them.

Growing up in a time and place where there were no supermarkets let alone aisles of packs of salty snacks in all manner of flavours and the only flavour of cracker biscuits stocked by the grocer was 'plain',  I loved these cheese flavoured  little biscuits. They were quite popular in the family as it wasn't only my mother who made them. It is quite a retro recipe but I couldn't resist having a go and decided to stick as close to the original as I could even though little tweaks and updates kept springing to mind. If you have access to those supermarket aisles and all the flavours, shapes and constituents why should you bother? Allow me to suggest:

• you have some leftover cheese that will only lurk in the back of the fridge forgotten, especially once the Christmas cheeseboard is unwrapped.
• you have read the ingredients list on the back of some of those supermarket packs and are none too impressed by all the things you'd never really thought of as food before.
• with school closed for the winter break, you have some extra hands to help with cutting out but you just can't face the thought of another batch of sugar-laden cookies.
• stacked into an airtight jar, they make a good 'home-made' gift.
• the smell as they come out of the oven beats opening any packet

Convinced? Here's the recipe in modern metric terms.

Flippies

You will need:

• 20g butter
• 330g flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne*
• 75g cheese**

Oven Temperature 220° C
Cookie sheets

You need to:

1. Make up the dough before you switch the oven on to heat.
2. Place the butter in a measuring jug and top up with enough boiling water to make 220ml.
3. Mix together the flour, salt and cayenne in a large bowl.
4. Grate the cheese and mix into the dry ingredients. Make a well in the centre and pour in the melted butter and hot water.
5. Mix just enough to make a smooth  ball of dough then cover with a sprinkling of flour and set aside to cool.
6. Once the dough is cool and workable, preheat the oven to 220° C, lightly grease some cookie slides and flour the work top.
7. Roll the dough out very thinly. The original recipe says wafer thin but I think our modern familiarity with filo pastry might have hiked up our notion of wafer-thin. Slightly less than the thickness of a 5 pence piece will do.
8. Cut out the biscuits using the very smallest round cutter or cocktail cutters if you have them. There is quite a lot of dough to cut out and I can see why the cutting utensil of choice in the family became a knife to simply cut the dough into squares or diamonds. This is not a television bake-off so they don't all have to be the same size or shape. Aiming for the hand-crafted look, you can even cook the larger edge pieces as tasters' perks.
9. Place the shapes on the greased cookie sheet and bake in the oven for 5-7 minutes. 
10. Loosen the biscuits on the tray as soon as you take them out and leave them to cool. They keep well in an airtight tine or jar. Serve them as nibbles with drinks, slightly larger ones can be served with dips.  

* Pairing cheese with cayenne seemed almost obligatory back when this recipe was written. It is not a spice that seems much in use now so you could substitute a mild chilli powder or  paprika if you have either of those to hand and adjust the quantity accordingly.
** I used a tangy cheddar but any cheeses hard enough to grate would probably work well. I was tempted to put in some Parmesan but that wasn't around when I first fell for these and I was out to feast on nostalgia!

Sometimes these puff up in the oven in some wonder of culinary magic science which I  clearly can't replicate on demand. I wonder if that is how they came by their name.