Settembrini - biscuits filled with fig

"Settembrini" from Mulino Bianco was one of my favourite biscuits back in Hungary, long time ago...I have often longed for these great little, fig filled biscuits with a nice, crumbling texture in a bit of a sad way, as on the other side of the world, where we live now, they are not available.

Fig is anyway a sort of unfulfilled love affair to me as every summer holiday we spend in Sabran, in the South of France I can see zillions of fig trees in the village bearing their fruits so teasingly bending towards the road side only to be too green at that time of the year! We are never there when they are juicy, sweet and ripe with so much aroma in thier purple skin! Painful even just to think about it....;)

So when a pocket of dried fig fell on my head upon opening the kitchen cupboard a couple of days ago I just thought that I should be able to make "Settembrini", should not I?!

I have searched for recipes, but nothing came up except this Italian (of course!) blog here, which I adapted the biscuit part from and created the filling with fig, walnut and maple syrup. Such a lovely combination! I added oat brans to the biscuit dough as that gives a bit of nuttiness (on top of also being a better option than just flour).

The dough is a bit soft and sticking (which will result in a great biscuit texture) so rolling it out between baking papers helped a lot.

The result: a really delightful biscuit, big on fig with lovely walnut and maple notes! Better than the industrial "Settembrini" of my youth!

Ingredients

For the biscuit dough: 150g standard flour 100g oat brans 125g icing sugar 125g butter at room temperature 1 whole egg plus a yolk 2 tsp of ground cinnamon For the filling: 250g dried fig 125g ground walnut 6 tbsp of maple syrup zest of one lemon

Method

For the dough, measure out the flour, oat brans, sugar and cinnamon and crumble in the butter evenly with your hands. Add the eggs and mix it well together. Wrap the dough in film and put it in the fridge for at least an hour. While it is chilling, prepare the filling. In a mixer add the figs (without the very top, hard part), the walnut, lemon zest and the maple syrup and blitz it together. Taste if it is sweet enough for you and adjust. Afterwards, roll the dough out between baking papers. Cut out circles (mine were 7cm diameters resulting in 5-5,5 cm cookies), put a ball of the filling in the middle (please see the photos), wrap the dough around and form a ball with your palms then flatten it and put it on a baking tray that has been lined with baking paper. Take a fork and mark the top of the biscuit with it. Bake them in a preheated oven at 200C degree for about 10-15 minutes. They need to turn just very pale golden. Sprinkle some icing sugar on the top if desired. Enjoy!

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