Raspberry Debacle

Until I moved to England, I’d never seen a bumblebee. They’re brilliant: lumbering, fluffy, huge-bottomed, apparently convinced they should nest in my hair, and very cute. Usually I react to cute things by wanting to put them in my mouth, and bumblebees fly so slowly that you could eat them right out of the air; the only problem is that they aren’t delicious enough.

The idea that the world would be better if more things tasted nice is an old one. There are wedding dresses made of cream puffs and scale models of San Francisco made out of jelly; and there’s the mediaeval dream of Cockaigne, the country where the walls are pies and the flowers are buttered scones, and everything is the most delicious food you’ve ever tasted. The twelfth-century The Golden Dream tells the story:

There are rivers great and fine
Of oil, milk, honey and wine;
Water there serves no purpose
Except to be looked at and to wash with.

In Cockaigne, the animals want to be eaten. The pigs are fried and cheerful, walking around with knives in their backs, so that you can carve out a slice more easily. Nobody works, nobody is blind or ill, and you get paid to eat or drink. There are no laws (except against working), because everyone has everything they want. Owls lay fur coats, and horse defecate poached eggs.

The geese roasted on the spit
Fly to that abbey, God knows,
And cry out: “Geese, all hot, all hot!”
They bring along plenty of garlic.

Cockaigne is a world not just of greed but of sloth and lust and mischievous monks who fly away from the abbey when they’re supposed to be praying:

When the abbot sees for himself
That his monks fly away from him,
He takes a maiden of the company
And turns up her white behind
And beats the small drums with his hand
To make the monks alight on land.
When his monks see [him do] that,
They fly down to the maid
And go all around the wench
And pat all her white behind
And then, after their labor,
Go meekly home to drink.

No wonder that to get there, you have to wade chin-deep in pig dung for seven years. In the Netherlands, Cockaigne is Luileckerland, “lazy luscious land”, and can only be reached if you eat your way through a ten-thousand-foot-high rice pudding.

Come the 21st century, and remnants of Cockaigne hang about in Australian advertising campaigns:

Wouldn’t it be nice if the world was Cadbury?
Going to the pics would be so sweet!
There’d be no need for munchies:
Cad’bry Dairy Milk is the perfect treat.
If someone came and blocked your screen view,
Just take a bite and make a hole to see through.
Wouldn’t it be nice?

In other versions of the ad, viewers are urged to respond to ravenous sharks by saying “I’m chocolate — I invite you”. This is Cockaigne with the eater-eatee wall broken down, where it’s humans who wander the streets with benign smiles, relishing the opportunity to feed others.

Back in London, on this side of the ten-thousand-foot rice pudding hill, it’s cold and the bumblebees have gone into hiding. The best I can do is these honey-and-gingerbread bee biscuits (cookies if you’re American); inanimate, and too big to fly into your mouth in one go anyway, but crisp and chewy and not covered in hair. Just remember to pull out the eyes before you eat them.

Honey Bee Biscuits
(adapted from these Molasses Honey Ginger Cookies)

For the pale half:
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup white sugar
1/4 cup honey
Half an egg yolk (the other half goes into the dark dough; if you like, keep the egg-white to help the biscuits stick together later)
3/4 cup plain white flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
A pinch of salt

For the dark half:
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 cup golden syrup
Half an egg yolk
3/4 cup wholemeal flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground coriander
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
A pinch of salt

For decoration:
40 cloves
40 blanched almonds or almond slivers

For the pale half of the mixture, cream together the butter, then beat in the white sugar, then the honey. Add the half egg-yolk and stir it in. Sift in the plain white flour and the baking powder, then add the ginger, cinnamon and salt. Mix until it all clumps together into dough. Roll the dough into a ball, wrap the ball in clingfilm, and chill it in the fridge for a couple of hours.

For the dark half, cream together the butter, then beat in the brown sugar, then the golden syrup. Add the half egg-yolk and stir it in. Sift in the wholemeal flour and the baking powder, then add the cinnamon, coriander, nutmeg and salt. Mix until it all clumps together into dough. Roll the dough into a ball, wrap the ball in clingfilm, and chill it in the fridge for a couple of hours.

When the doughs have been chilling for a couple of hours, remove them from the fridge and preheat the oven to 175C. Cover baking trays with greaseproof paper.

Take a handful of dough from the pale ball, and roll that handful out on a floured surface into a long snake, about a centimetre thick and thirty or forty centimetres long (if you took too much dough, just push the rest back into the ball for now). Repeat using the dark dough, and roll the dark snake right up to the pale snake, so they’re lying next to each other, pushing them together a little (you can brush their sides with the egg-white to help them stick if you like, but it isn’t really necessary). Repeat this with another pale snake, then another dark, so that you have four long snakes lying next to each other, light-dark-light-dark.

Use a rolling pin to flatten the four snakes a little - don’t push down, just roll the pin over them lightly - so that they stick together more firmly. Then cut out your biscuits. A plain round cutter or the edge of a glass would be fine if you want fat bees; I used a round pastry cutter to make two overlapping circles, and just used the overlapping almond-shaped segment where they joined for the bees.

Repeat until you’ve used up all the balls of dough or you get bored (which will probably happen first). If you can’t be bothered separating out the pastry scraps into their separate colours and rolling them into sausages again, just bundle it all together into a ball and then roll it out to about a centimetre thick: the two colours will be marbled together, and you can just cut the dough into whatever shapes you like, to cook in the same way as the bees.

Transfer the bees to the lined baking sheets. It doesn’t matter if they fall apart as you move them, since the two doughs will stick together firmly as they cook; just reassemble any fallen-apart bees on the tray. Add almonds for wings, and cloves for eyes.

Bake for ten minutes, rotating the trays halfway through. Once the biscuits have been out of the oven for a couple of minutes, transfer them to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Makes about 20. Pull out the eyes before eating.

(Offline sources on Cockaigne: Stewart Lee Allen’s In the Devil’s Garden)