homemade graham crackers (yes, again!)

i’ve blogged before about making graham crackers.  i’m not sure what my obsession about them is, but maybe i’m just fascinated that there are so many recipes for them online?  both times i’ve made them before, they were tasty, but always ended up with a more soft-cookie consistency, not so much the crunch of a cracker.

this recipe, by way of amy of angry chicken, promised “snap” and i was intrigued.  i cheated on the pantry challenge just a bit to procure some barley flour and then kept putting off making them until one rainy sunday afternoon.  it’s a very simple dough to put together and it helps that she compares it to pie dough.  one note i will add to her instructions is to make sure that you start kneading it with your hand before you decide to put in all the milk.  i kept stirring it with a spatula and ended up adding all the milk because it just wasn’t coming together at all and then, when i finally started kneading it with my hands, it was just a bit more sticky than i would have preferred.

also, her comparisons to pie dough make me wonder what this would taste like as an actual pie crust….

i had a hard time keeping bits of this dough out of my mouth as i was rolling it out.  they just kept jumping in!  and the taste–full of warm cinnamon, cloves and brown sugar– is heavenly both before and after baking.

i went with a simple square(ish) shape (other than the edges i cut off, which all looked like the scrambled states of america) rather than the complicated cookie cutters i’d used before and i couldn’t be bothered to prick holes in them.

i think the real secret to these is rolling them out as thinly as you can, because they do have snap!  it’s such a wet day, that i may try her “put them back in the oven for five minutes” trick for some of the thicker ones, but …. these are my favorite so far.  i love the flavor (although mr. happy stuff thinks they taste more like a molasses or ginger cookie.  odd, since they have neither molasses (other than what’s in the brown sugar) nor ginger.), the happy little dude inhales them as fast as i do, and i think another batch may be in our not-too-distant future.