Cocoanut Tea Rolls

Today, we are venturing to Australia!

Coconut Tea Rolls 1 egg ¼ cup milk 8 oz (2 cups) self-raising flour (to substitute plain flour, see below) 2 oz (¼ cup) butter 8 oz (1 cup) sugar 4 oz (1 packed cup) shredded coconut Additional milk and coconut flakes for rolling Heat oven to 400°. Have greased or lined baking sheets ready. Beat the egg and milk together, set aside. Sift the flour into a large bowl. Or, stir the flour with a whisk to break up any clumps and fluff it up. Gently rub in the butter with your fingertips until the two are thoroughly combined. Mix in the sugar and coconut. Then mix in the egg and milk. It may seem dry and crumbly at first, but keep mixing and it should all come together into a stiff dough. (If it doesn't, you can add milk one small spoonful at a time.) Knead for about thirty seconds. Dough will be sticky. Roll into small balls. Brush each one with milk, then roll in coconut. Place on the baking sheet, giving them plenty of room to spread. Bake until golden at the edges, about 10-15 minutes. To substitute plain all-purpose flour: Using a measuring cup: Put 1 tablespoon of baking powder and 1 teaspoon salt in a measuring cup, then spoon in flour until it comes up to two cups. Using a scale: Tare it out, add 1 tablespoon baking powder and 1 teaspoon salt, then add flour until it all adds up to 8 ounces. The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; May 30, 1932; page 1

When we made the economical raisin pie, we said that we tried to figure out how old the recipe was and instead found a different economical raisin pie in an Australian newspaper. It was printed above something called "bloater paste," which is apparently mashed smoked herrings. It might be easy to snark on herring paste, but that's only because they didn't call it "pâté." After all, smoked salmon pâté semi-reliably shows up in high-tax-bracket restaurants that would never serve salmon paste.

The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; May 30, 1932

I'm not in a rush to make the raisin pie from the same news page (though I haven't ruled it out either), but I really wanted to try the "Cocoanut Tea Rolls." (As a side note: I love that the recipe column was literally top-center of the front page.)

Since I now own a kitchen scale, I didn't have to convert weights to cups. Nevertheless, I couldn't get past the first line of the ingredient list without having to look things up. I needed to know how much baking powder to use because I wasn't about to buy self-raising flour. (Or self-rising, depending on where you live.) Skipping past the AI slop (is it worth it?) and SEO garbage in my search results, I found what I sought on Betty Crocker's website.

I have pause and give credit to the General Mills people. We all know that Betty Crocker is not a charity operation, but they give out a lot of paywall-free cooking advice. They even have an "Ask Betty" section on their website where you can send in any question and get a free professional answer. It almost makes up for the company getting children hooked on part-of-this-complete-breakfast sugar kibble before they're smart enough to know better.

We don't really do self-raising flour in the US. Most stores stock it, but it doesn't pop in recipes very often. This may be the one time we Americans aren't lazier than everyone else. We may drive anywhere that's farther than a three-minute walk (that's 1.8 hectoseconds for our metric friends), but by God we will get out a little spoon and measure our own baking powder. 

That little mound of white powder is all-American hard work.

Now that we had all our ingredients sorted (both self-raising and otherwise), it appears our "tea rolls" start out like scones. You mix the flour and butter together like you're doing a pie crust, add some other things to make a firm dough, then knead it a bit and bake. 

 

If you look at our dough balls, you can see that this was a sticky process. I wondered if I had done something wrong. I've made a lot of rolls, and the dough isn't supposed turn your hands into a mess.

Well, here they are, rolled in coconut and ready to bake! I immediately thought of Alec Baldwin's Schweddy Balls.

The recipe says to bake "until golden," but I started to worry before the dough got slightly warm. Some of the coconut had already browned and we had a long baking time left. Would I end up scraping cinders off my tea rolls?

I couldn't decide if I made these right. On one hand, they're called "tea rolls" but ours were more like cookies. However, it is my understanding that only Americans use the word cookie. I haven't jaunted to Australia or the UK to find out, but I did search for the word "cookies" across every issue of the the newspaper that today's recipe comes from, and only got a lot of occurrences of the word "cockies." (If anyone from Australia happens to drop by, please tell me what the heck that means!) 

So if the word "biscuit" changes meaning across every international border and "cookies" cease to exist outside of The Land Of The Free, perhaps we made perfectly correct Australian tea rolls. Sure, they are a tiny bit overbaked, but they don't seem to mind too much. Some recipes are ruined if they bake just twenty seconds too long, but cocoanut tea rolls will forgive you for not hearing the timer.

As soon as I tried one of these, I stopped worrying about whether they came out as Australia intended. No recipe can go wrong and be this good. They're dense and chewy with a wonderfully crisp outside. Everyone who tried these liked them. One person came back to the kitchen, grabbed quite the handful, and said "Work can wait."

We're going to sign off with what is apparently an iconic piece of Australian culture: