How to create delicious homemade graham crackers easily

Hi and welcome to Bold Baking Basics. This is where we get stuck into the fundamentals of baking. These videos are about getting you to bake with confidence, anytime, anywhere. So if you watch a lot of Bigger Bolder Baking, you know I use a lot of graham crackers. However, they're an American cookie and aren't always available worldwide. So what do we do in this situation? I show you how to make your own, and trust me, they're even better than store bought. As always the recipe can be found on BiggerBolderBaking.com. Okay let's get started in a nice big bowl. Add in your whole wheat flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt. And then just mix these ingredients together. So into our dry ingredients we're going to add in our room temperature butter. And then with your nice clean hands or you can use a dough cutter, we're going to rub in the butter until it resembles kind of coarse bread crumbs. And what I mean by that is that you have some big lumps of butter and some small lumps. So if you've never had a graham cracker before, it's a whole wheat cookie with a little bit of honey and cinnamon, they're really delicious. Traditionally they're used in making s'mores, I also use them a lot for the bases of pies and cheesecakes, they're just really really great. So those are our dry ingredients, now let's mix together our wet. In a separate jug I'm going to add in a little bit of milk, some runny honey, and some vanilla extract. And then just mix all these ingredients together. You'll notice that there's no egg in this recipe which is great, not all cookies need eggs and it just makes it that bit crisper. Okay great, now what you want to do is add your wet ingredients into your dry. Then with a spatula just mix it together. Oh my gosh it smells really good. So you'll see it kind of start to clump together. What you might want to do is get in there with your hands and pull it together until it forms a ball of dough. So my rule about cookie dough is that they always need to be chilled before you go to roll them out because it makes it so much easier. So I'm gonna cover this in some cling wrap like so. So right now I'm gonna pop this into the fridge for a minimum of one hour, it'll make it so much easier to roll out once it's cold. What you can do at this stage also is leave it in the fridge for up to three days, also it freezes really well for up to eight weeks. So it's been an hour, you wanna make sure that your dough gets really cold because it is a soft dough. Now it is ready to be rolled out. So on a floured surface with my rolling pin, I'm going to roll this out until it's around a quarter of an inch thick. I like these cookies a little bit on the thicker side but if you want them thinner you can absolutely have them so. So there you go, I've got kind of a funny looking square circle, this is perfect, it's the thickness that I want. So here I have a pizza cutter and I have my ruler, I always have to have a ruler in the kitchen, super important. So what I'm going to do is just cut these cookies two inches by five inches. Now these are the traditional shape of a graham cracker, if you want different shapes, go for it, you can make them square, smaller, whatever you like. But I'm gonna cut these 2 inches by 5 inches. Try and get them as even as you can. So I have the shape that I want, now like I said this is a soft dough so you do want to move kind of quickly and carefully, lift it up off the counter top and place them onto your baking tray lined with parchment. This cookie dough is on the softer side because of the honey. If you're trying to add more whole wheat into your diet, this is a sneaky little way of doing it. You get a cookie and you get whole wheat at the same time. There we go, lovely. So I'm just gonna do one tray like so. Okay perfect. Now they're the shape of graham crackers, they smell like graham crackers but we have to make them look like graham crackers. So I'm just gonna get a little knife and I'm gonna put a line down the center and across. And then with a fork I'm just going to prick it on either sides. Just to make sure it really looks like a traditional graham cracker. So there you go, our homemade graham crackers definitely look the part, now they're gonna be baked off. So bake your graham crackers off at 350°F or 180°C for roughly 10-12 minutes. If you want them really crisp, do 12 minutes. So while our cookies are in the oven, I'm gonna tell you something that I learned recently that I thought was really interesting. Graham crackers are called graham crackers because they're made with something called graham flour. That's right, graham flour is actually a thing. It's a whole wheat flour, kind of coarsely ground and used a lot in baking and in breads and things like that. So it's not just the name of a cookie, it's actually the name of the flour used in the cookie. Graham Flour is actually named after a preacher called Sylvester Graham and he believed that we all should be eating a diet high in whole wheat. So these cookies take no time at all to bake, they smell absolutely amazing. Once they're cooled, they'll be a little bit like this. They're snappy, they're crunchy, they're delicious, without a doubt, these blow store-bought graham crackers out of the water, like they're not even in the same playing field. These have a great flavor with lovely cinnamon, honey, you can use these in any of my recipes where I use graham crackers for something like my homemade s'more or even my no-bake s'more pie. They'll make a great addition. Head over to my website right now and check out how you can make homemade marshmallows from scratch and homemade brown sugar. I'll see you back here really soon for more Bigger Bolder Baking.