Anzacs are a great biscuit should you ever want to make ‘special’ cookies – if you know what I mean.

Mum has been churning out Anzacs to the same recipe ever since I can remember. When I left home and started carving a life of my own, this recipe was one of those home comforts I had to go back and ask for. I don’t recall having to grovel down at mum’s feet and beg, which is surprising actually. Mum guards most of her recipes very tightly (something old school, where you kept your recipes like a best kept secret), so I am probably committing some major sin blogging it. I know I would have had to majorly suck up for it. Mummy dearest….kiss, kiss – that sort of thing. Sometimes it’s just worth it really.

I know being part-Dutch you would think that I freely smoke weed and crunch on Oma’s hash cookies as I peruse my weekly newsletter from The Cannibis College, Amsterdam. Unfortunately, I don’t. I am entertained by the concept of it all, but I don’t action that into a reality. I am really a big dag. I have been accused of being so straight that I only cross at the green man. When growing up, I was the girl who was miss goody two shoes class prefect who would report you for smoking in the girls toilets to the teachers. Yep, it’s true.

When I lived in NZ I had a work colleague Aaron who was one of those friends who was my polar opposite in so many ways, and yet we were such great friends. He once told me that thought my being part-Dutch was so cool because it conjured up images of relaxed attitudes to drugs and prostitution (his idea of cool). From that time on I would sign my emails to him ‘Geri, Of Dutch Descent’ purely because it would tickle his fancy. Only on one occasion, after being friends with Aaron for about 4 years did he offer me a draw on his spliff (at the tender age of 28). After sitting there for about 2 minutes nervously contemplating the morals of it all, I finally inhaled. I promptly turned around and simultaneously vomited and had an asthma attack. I didn’t get any special after effects, I didn’t feel good, I felt green, and I wasn’t instantly transformed into ‘cool’.

My husband Tom lived for 20 years in the Netherlands, where using cannabis is legal, and you can smoke it or eat it in special coffee shops. He has never tried it. Not once. Not even been tempted. Why bother he says? What’s the big deal? He has witnessed mostly tourists visiting his country who loose all control and get silly on the stuff – to the extent now where the Netherlands is considering applying some legislation. It doesn’t look very cool to him.

Anyway, back to my story. An old boyfriend and his mate once obtained a stick of ‘special butter’. We were going camping for a 10 days, and these two clowns thought that if transformed into biscuits, this magical butter would make their holiday even more un-memorable. They wanted me to cook them some special cookies when I was focused on making sure we had enough food, tents etc. It was a impossible to do it all, so I left them the recipe for Mum’s Anzacs on the bench top, took out all of the ingredients from the pantry (as I so knew they wouldn’t be able to find them having never navigated a pantry before), and placed all of the measuring spoons and cups, trays etc on the bench. You couldn’t have made it any more straight forward really.

My girlfriend and I went shopping for real food while these too giggled like school girls in the kitchen. When we came home, the house smelt of  ‘aroma of Anzac’, so I thought that they had managed to do well. But on walking into the kitchen, we noticed what looked like an Anzac on steroids lying on the kitchen bench. Each individual biscuit melted together into one big massive Amoeba-like thing on the tray. It had also spewed off the sides and dripped into the oven. What a nightmare! I knew instantly that something had gone wrong. Upon tasting a crumb, it was so bitter that the saliva in your mouth started to foam. We walked through what they did with the recipe. The ingredients called for one and a half ‘tspn’s’ of baking soda. They misread ‘tspn’ this to mean tablespoons.

I had a fabulous time camping. My girlfriend and I laughed so hard watching the two of them impossibly trying to get high on something so repulsive they couldn’t keep it in their mouths. All because they had never read a recipe before. Classic!

So, if you do find yourself with a stick of ‘special’ butter, and in need of a good recipe, then I can recommend mum’s Anzacs. If you can’t read said recipe, then I suggest you just eat the butter, on toast. It’s less risky.

Below, a few photo’s I took from the shop windows when in Amsterdam last year. Yes, these do tickle my fancy!