The boy who cried knickers!
Wendy Hays
During the late 1980s, I taught at a high school in Hobart’s northern suburbs.
The school was of open plan design, and the dress code for both staff and students was very casual.
Grade 8D on Wednesday afternoon was an extremely challenging class.
Having taken some time to settle the group, I began demonstrating this month’s biscuit recipe to teach the creaming method of mixing ingredients.
Not long into my spiel, I was interrupted by a particularly difficult student, “Miss, what have you got down the back of your trousers?”
I brushed him off as being obstructive but realised that something was truly amiss when some more reliable students insisted that something was there.
Putting my hand up the leg of my trousers, I was horrified to extricate the knickers that I’d been wearing the day before.
Much laughter ensued, and from then on, these biscuits have been known as Smarty Pants Cookies.
Now I can’t condone displaying one’s underwear as a classroom management strategy, but Grade 8D was a completely different class from that moment on.
Smarty Pants Cookies
Ingredients
• 90 g softened butter or margarine
• 80 g castor sugar
• 80 g brown sugar
• a few drops of vanilla essence
• 1 egg - beaten in a cup
• 180 g self-raising flour
• 1 C of Smarties, M&Ms or choc bits
Method
1 Line 2 oven trays with baking paper and preheat the oven to 180C.
2 Cream butter, sugars and vanilla until light and fluffy using an electric beater or wooden spoon.
3 Beat in the egg.
4 Using a metal spoon, gently stir in the flour and lollies
5 Leaving room for the biscuits to spread, use a spoon and a knife to place balls of mixture (about the size of a walnut) on trays.
6 Bake for about 15 -20 minutes. Cool on trays for a few minutes, then lift onto a wire rack to cool completely.
