Scottish Fancies

What are “Scottish Fancies?” Turns out they’re a type of drop cookie. They’re not particularly fancy, and I’d wager they aren’t Scottish either.

As an added bonus, they are also gluten-free if that’s a dietary restriction of yours!

Initial thoughts on the recipe

Okay, this one isn’t too weird. It’s an oat cookie recipe with nothing particularly out of place, so I can’t imagine it being inedible or anything unless I manage to mess it up bad. I do think it’s unusual that there is no flour, and I’m wondering how the texture will turn out.

The recipe concludes by instructing the reader to bake “in moderate oven until delicately browned.” Here’s where some of the guesswork comes in working with a historical recipe. What exactly is a moderate oven… 350? And there’s no cooking time…great-grandma Cora was clearly expecting people to know how to bake cookies without having to spell out the details!

Trying it out

Ok, this recipe isn’t exactly rocket science. For the most part it’s extremely simple and straight forward. The biggest mystery I needed to solve was the cooking temperature and time.

Everyone’s fave, Wikipedia, defines a moderate oven as a range of 350-375 °F. So basically, your average baking temperature.

Interestingly enough, all the recipes I could find online (which, to be fair, is not many) that did include an oven temperature said to set it to 325.

Since the original recipe is vague on the cooking directions to begin with, I took my cue from recipes like this one from Ana Penelope and cooked the Scottish Fancies at 325 for about 20 minutes.

In a departure from her write-up, however, I like these cookies best when they’re left slightly rounded like coconut macaroons, rather than flattened out. That may be because, quite simply, I like chewy oat things.

As an aside, I had to make these cookies twice. No, not because they’re that good (although yes, they’re definitely good enough to repeat). I had to remake them because when I transcribed the recipe, I made a small but critical error: instead of 1 and 1/4 cups of oats, I noted just 1/4 cup.

That cup’s worth of oats makes allll the difference when it comes to these being actual cookies instead of some sort of caramelized slab on the cookie sheet.

The verdict:

My reaction to these cookies is as simple as the recipe: I like ’em!

They’re buttery, chewy, and unobtrusively sweet. There’s just a touch of saltiness that gives it a perfect/sweet salty balance. This is the kind of dessert you would give to people who aren’t big fans of sweets.

That said, my rating is 4/5.

If you give these a try, let me know what you think!