Homemade cheez-its!

Most of my procrastination baking was heavily fueled by my go to study foods when I was stressed and just needed some nibbles around when I didn't have the time or brain capacity to feed myself. One summer day I realized I NEEDED cheese-its! Unfortunately the UK has some tough standards on food they're willing to import. This means my British friends are deprived of some serious American standards like Lucky Charms and (until recently) Oreos!! Occasionally you can find this American contraband at candy shops and now that the Amazon.co.uk has arrived many things can be found there too but at a hefty price! I'm taking almost $12 USD for a box of Lucky Charms people!! I've never been a Lucky Charms girl, I was more upset about the absence of cheetos! Apparently some of this stuff used to be available in the early 90s and has since been banned. Meaning these guys know what they're missing out on! No one had any clue what I was talking about when I started talking cheez-its though..

Here's how to get these guys:
I doctored this a bit from a recipe you can find here or here.
- 4 tablespoons butter (or 2oz)
- 8 oz sharp cheddar cheese
- 1 cup flour
- 1/2 tsp of salt
- some sort of spicy seasoning is optional: most recipes I saw called for cayenne. I added a little bit of chili powder and some paprika

Throw the butter and cheese into the food processor. I weighed out my cheese and butter. Butter is all like the Kerrygold, available in places like Trader Joe's, it's not all measured out into cups/tbsp/tsp like butter in America. Weighing because the best option for accuracy. Lard also comes in this fun shape. Yes. I've purchased lard. It was amazing.

Add all the other ingredients.

At this point you may have to beat the living day lights out of the damn food processor to get it to function. Seriously this thing was impossible and it took a good 30-40 minutes to get it together well enough to actually use... Once this battle is over, pulse this mixture up until it makes a big dough ball, like this one.

Remove the dough, feel free to retrieve those crumbles to eat or add to the dough. Then throw it onto a floured surface and roll it out. Make it's kind of even or the crackers will end up unevenly cooked.

Don't worry too much about the edges. 

Cut into strips down and across creating little squares. If you can't get the dough to make a nice shape just cut them off and re-roll at the end to make more crackers. If you're feeling REALLY fancy, you can use a toothpick to make these look more like authentic cheez-its.  I wasn't feeling that fancy this day so my crackers pre bake looked like this: 

Line these little guys up on a baking sheet lined with some parchment paper.  Throw them in the oven at 350 for 25 minutes.

Final product: gorgeous and delicious.