Trobies

I’ve been looking at the Trobies recipe since I started baking Grandma Bess’ cookies. Not sure why it’s taken me so long to try this recipe. Maybe because I’ve never heard of Trobies before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Or maybe because cut-out cookies aren’t my favorite to make. The time required to make cut-out cookies is sometimes more that I have, so I defer to drop or molded-shaped recipes.

Regardless of all that, I am glad I finally made Trobies! Before making them, I Googled Trobies cookies to see what might come up and what I could learn about this recipe. Only one item came up mentioning that Trobies is a Finnish cookie. In addition Google had a picture of our 1980 Cookies by Bess cookie book! After clicking on the picture, I realized the picture was listed because someone was auctioning their 1980, signed Cookies by Bess cookie book. Trobies was included in a list of recipes in the book description.

The Trobies recipe has several of my favorite recipe ingredients like quick oats and raisins. Although Trobies are nothing like an Old Fashioned Oatmeal Raisin Cookie, Trobies do have that great oat flavor and the raisin filling adds the perfect sweetness giving this cookie great flavors, texture, and beautiful presentation.

I’m rating Trobies 3-stars for cookie difficulty due to rolling out the cookie dough, making/mashing the raisins, and then finally filling and building the sandwich cookies. All in all, Trobies took a good 5 hours to make start to finish.

I pulled all my ingredients together, but realized after I took this picture that I forgot to include the raisins. I have plenty of pictures of the raisins below as I worked through the process, so hopefully I can be forgiven for leaving them out here ?

Buttermilk has shown up in a couple Cookies by Bess recpies, but I haven’t seen sour milk until this Trobies recipe. To ensure I made the sour milk correctly, I Googled sour milk. I found a Y Tube video that explains how to make sour milk. It’s simply 1 cup milk and 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar. Whisk together, then let the mixture sit for 5 minutes or until it starts to curdle a little. I remember using vinegar to make buttermilk, so I tried the lemon juice here.

The Trobies recipe calls for ½ cup milk, so I used ½ tablespoon lemon juice. I let the mixture sit for 5 minutes, then a few more minutes, then I added a little more lemon juice. In the end, the milk didn’t curdle.

I wondered if it didn’t curdle because I used skim milk. Skim milk is all I keep on hand in my refrigerator. I thought maybe the lack of fat prevented the curdling. After looking this up, seems milk with less fat is more likely to curdle. So, who knows why mine didn’t. Regardless, I poured it in with the butter, sugar, and vanilla and moved on with the recipe.

The milk didn’t completely get absorbed by the butter and sugar.

But the dough all mixed together nicely once I added the dry ingredients. Such a pretty texture.  And soooo good tasting!

Finally, I added the 3 cups of oats to finish off the dough.  At this point, it tasted even better!

Before I got started rolling the dough and cutting out the cookies, I started heating the raisins, sugar, and water on the stove. I started heating the raisins on medium-low heat. I’m glad I started this process at this point because it took quite a while to cook down the raisins. I let them simmer for just about the entire time I was cutting out the cookies.  Mixing them occasionally.

Once the raisins were cooking, I tried rolling out the cookie dough. I realized right away that the dough was too sticky for rolling, so I added some additional sifted flour to the dough and used a good amount of additional flour to roll out dough.

I don’t have a small round cookie cutter, but I do have a small scalloped cutter. This worked perfect and also gave the cookies a little different personality!

Once the dough consistency was perfect , my cookie cutting moved along nicely.

The cookies didn’t spread or rise even while baking, so I was able to fill the cookie sheet with a lot of cookies. This helped speed things up quite a bit.

I baked the cookies for 10 minutes.

Using a small cookie cutter made a ton of cookies! In the end, I counted over 300 cookies!

While cutting out and baking all these cookies, I checked the raisins and started mashing them with a potato masher. I let the raisins cool completely before starting to sandwich up the cookies.

It was very daunting to begin the sandwich building process with over 300 cookies staring at me ? But I got started and quickly got into a rhythm. It took a little over an hour to make all the little Trobie sandwiches.

The Trobies are done and they look awesome!

They look even more awesome when sprinkled with powdered sugar.

Trobies are a wonderful tea type cookie with a subtle, oaty cookie and sweet raisin filling. Perfect to a fancy tea party or just for the kids after school. The recipe mentions that dates or apricots can also be used. What a great assortment if you want to mix up the batch.

I highly recommend Trobies! Just make sure you have a good amount of time to make them!

XXOO,

Janet

 

 

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