A (no longer) Secret Family Recipe

When my Cassandra walks up the hill to introduce herself to Athena, she takes jam drops. That is because my jam drop recipe is one of my most precious things.

I have posted before about the magic of living next door to my grandmother. We gardened together and we baked together.  My grandmother baked in a woodfired oven that was actually quite flash. It burned 24/7 because it also produced all her hot water. Consider that on a Queensland day in summer.

The thing I remember her baking most often was jam drops. Sadly my grandmother died when I was 11 and I thought no more about the actual recipe until my mother gave me a stack of recipe books including her handwritten recipes.

So, the recipe in the picture is my grandmother’s recipe in my mother’s handwriting. Her mother-in-law.

Did I bake those jam drops? You bet I did! You know how weird memory is, right? As soon as I smelt that biscuit mixture, as soon as I tasted it I was blasted back 20 years.

My kids loved baking these with me. They are perfect to bake with children. They can roll the dough, poke the holes, and put in the jam. No wonder my grandmother chose them for us to bake together.

Forgot those giant dry old things you see in cafes. A real jam drop is small and delicate and buttery.

This recipe is a gift from my grandmother, to my mother, and then to me and now to my children and to you!

4 thoughts on “A (no longer) Secret Family Recipe

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.