'Pastry Scraps' Oat Biscuits

 - with cranberries and hazelnuts.

I always err on the side of caution when making pastry, having been caught out several times trying to stretch the amount quoted in a recipe further than it wants to go. Perhaps I just can't roll it as thin as a professional pastry chef, but I'd rather have a bit more than I need, than dough which has to be stretched to fit the tin, then shrinks unevenly when baked, or even worse, tears as you try to move it.

And since I found this recipe for using leftover pastry I don't have to worry about waste either (although I usually rolled out any scraps, baked them and then crumbled for wild bird food).

I had 200g of leftover shortcrust pastry, so added 200g of rolled oats, 100g butter, 100g of light muscovado sugar and half a teaspoon cinnamon. I left everything in a large bowl to allow the pastry to warm up a bit from the fridge, then kneaded everything together until no trace of any lumps of pastry could be seen. Then I mixed in 35g chopped toasted hazelnuts and 35g of dried cranberries which had been chopped into smaller pieces.

After  rolling out the dough, I used a 6cm cutter to cut out circles, then baked at 180C for about 15 minutes - a little longer than suggested in the recipe.

This recipe makes great biscuits which are not too sweet, but the sugar can be left out altogether to make savoury oat biscuits. I imagine that you could add dried herbs or seeds to flavour savoury biscuits but I haven't tried that yet.