Scottish Oat Cakes

As most of you know, I spent 5 years of my life living in beautiful Scotland. One of my favourite foods there was not deep-fried Mars Bar but actually, the good old humble oat cake. These are gorgeous cracker-style biscuits to serve with cheese and, in Scotland, there are numerous different varieties, brands etc. In Australia, I have barely found any, let alone any decent ones!

On Monday I was going to a friend's house and decided to take a cheese platter. So I thought, what better to go with the cheese platter than some home-made oat cakes. I did my usual trick and searched the internet for some recipes. I did find one on the "Undiscovered Scotland" website and thought it sounded quite good. My only reservation was that the recipe used lard which is something I have never cooked with but I thought, how bad can it be...haha, words that would come back to haunt me. I didn't even know if I could buy it here to be honest but thankfully Safeway was ever-faithful and I did manage to get my hands on some.

So, without further ado, I set about making the recipe. On smelling the raw lard I wasn't overly impressed but decide to proceed anyway. The biscuits looked beautiful and I was so excited to have reproduced an old favourite. Before leaving, I decided to taste one of the biscuits to make sure they were OK...

OH MY GOODNESS...DISGUSTING!!! All I could taste was the lard and they were so, so horrible! I couldn't even swallow the small mouthful I had taken and had to immediately throw that and all the remaining biscuits into the bin! I also threw the remaining lard in the bin to ensure I am never ever ever tempted to cook with it again...disgusting!!! I guess it is probably to be expected when you cook with something described on the label as "animal fat". Oh dear...Yuk, yuk, yuk.

I am obviously not going to give you the recipe for this one!!!