Books and cakes - 14

    Here's a book by a Frenchman and it is disappointingly lacking in food! We are told often enough in Alain-Fournier's The Lost Estate that people are sitting down to eat, but no details are given - except at one point where Francois has a burnt griddle cake - so I had to extemporise for this month's Book Group afternoon tea fare. With a very weak play on the name of the lost estate itself, Les Sablonnieres, I've made a variation on (the equally accentless) petits sables, short biscuits which can rely on their butter content for flavouring or have spice added, as here.

I whizzed everything together in the food processor, mixing 2 oz. caster sugar, 6 oz. plain flour, and the ground seeds from four or five cardamom pods, then adding 4 oz. butter and 1/2 tsp. vanilla essence. I chilled the dough for 20 mins. before rolling, cutting, and baking for 9 mins. in total (I put them on the lowest rung of the Aga baking oven for 7 minutes and moved them to the floor of the roasting oven to brown for a further two, but gas 3 or the equivalent for say, 10-12 minutes should do nicely - it depends how well-fired you want them. Leave them to cool on the baking sheet.
 If you feel they need a bit of decoration, you could use icing sugar ....

.....well, it is Valentine's Day, there's a character in the book called Valentine, and on p. 156 of my edition, "... Meaulnes was writing, dipping his pen deep into an old-fashioned porcelain inkwell in the shape of a heart."

(You can read what we thought of the book itself here).