When it was her job to assemble gourmet goodies for the four-day Freycinet Experience walk, Chris Scott couldn’t find any really good cookies made in Tasmania - so she made some herself.
On her trek around Freycinet, the deputy editor of Australian Gourmet Traveller magazine greatly appreciated the shortbread biscuits and suggested to Chris that she had the makings of a small business.
Chris and her husband Peter did just that,and last year started Biscottelli - gourmet cookies made fresh every week for delivery to only a handful of Hobart outlets - Hill Street Grocer among them - so as to keep close tabs on quality and turnover. Chris makes sure outlets order only as much as they can expect to sell before the next delivery.
Shortbread is the flagship of the Biscottelli range - straight, with orange and cardamom, with lemon and wattleseed or in novelty shapes - bilbies at Easter and stars at Christmas.
Chris has lived her whole life in a house where shortbread was baked. Her Scottish mother, Alma, used to make shortbread, and when she died while her children were still young, Chris’s father Mike Pearson determined that his children would at least not go without home baking, and he learned to make shortbread, bannocks and fruit cake. Even though Chris now produces shortbread for sale, her dad still sends her a packet of his every week from Western Australia.
Just quietly, Chris thinks her shortbread is better than her dad’s. She has reduced the amount of sugar so it is not too sweet, and uses unsalted butter so that she can control the quantity of salt that goes in.
Other Biscottelli lines are very gingery gingernuts, which took months to perfect. “People who buy gingernuts must like ginger, so there is no point in holding back on it,” Chris said.
Much research in libraries, among friends and old recipe books went into Biscottelli’s Anzac biscuit recipe. Chris was determined they would not be “like a flattened-out brandy snaps” and they’re not, but thick with oats. Other cookies Biscottelli makes are Italian Almond and Carnival, which combine chocolate chips, nuts and cinnamon, topped with a Brazil nut and a drizzle of chocolate on top.
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