Fantasy Food Friday: Elvish Lembas!

Hello, all!!

Welcome to another addition of Fantasy Food Fridays! If you're just joining us, Fantasy Food Fridays is an ongoing series of posts, hosted on- you guessed it- Fridays. Every week, I make a different food item from a fantasy book, movie or TV show, and then post pictures and how-to's here on the blog. Ready? Great!

This week, I tackled Lembas, from JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. It is described as "very nutritious, stays fresh for months when kept unbroken in its original leaf-wrappings, and is used for sustenance on long journeys."

In Peter Jackson's movies, the hobbits nibbled on a kind of unsweetened shortbread. It is brown on the outside and rather cream colored on the inside.

After doing a little bit of reading on Lembas, I decided to buy and use some flaxseed meal in this recipe. Because Lembas is supposed to be highly nutritious and fibrous, I wanted something that would give it that quality, as well as making it a little chewier.

So, anyway, I used

• white flour (although whole wheat or half and half would be great too)
• flaxseed meal (look for it in your gluten free or organic portion of the Grocery)
• white sugar
• butter

** flaxseed tip: if you do choose to add flaxseed, it needs to make up about a quarter of your total dry ingredients. I used 1 1/2 cups flour and 1/2 cup flaxseed**

I mixed the dry ingredients together and then melted the butter in the microwave before adding it to the dry ingredients.

When that was totally mixed in, I didn't have quite enough moisture in the dough, so I added a tablespoon of water at a time until I had something roughly the consistency of cookie dough. 

I rolled the dough out flat with a rolling pin- make sure you flour whatever surface you work on as it does get sticky!

(doesn't that look nice and healthy? mmmmmm)

And then I cut the dough into rectangles between an inch an three inches big or so.

I scooped the rectangles onto a greased cookie sheet and put them in the oven at 350 for about an hour...

And then disaster struck.

Somehow, I miscalculated the time, and they burned. One whole cookie sheet, black as anything. See?

look at those top ones. Toast, I say, toast.

However, although the others are a little browner than I would have liked, they still taste pretty  good! I especially like them with apple butter on top:

Flaxssed meal apparently browns faster than regular flour, so that might have been part of my problem too.

Things I would change next time:

• less cooking time!
• less sugar
• add a little baking powder or an egg or two so they rise a little bit. These are pretty cracker-y

But that's my Lembas experiment! Enjoy!

Have an idea for Fantasy Foods Friday? Leave it in the comments or email me at charisweible[@]yahoo.com (just remove the brackets!)