Christmas Treats

 42 Shortbread Biscuits Later...

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great Christmas and are looking forwards to the new year! For Christmas this year I made everyone some shortbread biscuits which I decorated in white royal icing. 

 

I made a set of six biscuits for each couple in my own and my boyfriends close family. This meant I had to bake and decorate 42 biscuits! It was a real challenge, but I actually really enjoyed doing it! I managed to bake them and decorate them all in one day.

I then wrapped them all up in little parcels, ready to be scoffed on Christmas day!

 

For the younger ones in my boyfriends family, I made 5 melting snowmen shortbread biscuits.

These were just as fun to make as last time!

 

Christmas Cupcakes

I also made 12 orange cupcakes for Christmas day, decorated in varying degrees of buttercream, to suit everyone's different tastes. 

Chocolate Log

And finally, I made me and my boyfriend a chocolate log for our Christmas on Christmas Eve. I used Mary Berry's Chocolate Log recipe, which was very easy to follow. 

I made all these treats over the period of just two days and I was quite impressed that I managed to do so much! Hopefully all the recipients of the goodies enjoyed them!

I got a few baking gifts for Christmas, so I am hoping to do some baking before I go to London next year (very soon), so stay tuned!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Thanks for reading!

 

Melting Snowmen Shortbread

Yummy Snowmen Puddles!

So as Christmas nears I am going to be increasingly busy with baking treats! This might be my last blog before Christmas, but stay tuned for more blogs in the new year! I have a new job starting in January, so the blogs wont be as frequent, but I am hoping I will get some time to bake during the weekends!

These little chaps were made using this tutorial here LINK.

I used the BBC GoodFood Shortbread recipe to make the base of these snowmen, then drizzled on the royal 'snow' icing. I don't have a microwave and was concerned how to melt the marshmallows. I ended up using the oven and putting them in for about 20 seconds, which worked fine! The marshmallows make great melting heads!

I thought the original designs made the snowmen look a little too happy, so mine are in different states of distress!
 

These three are my favourites! They look like they are getting progressively more melted! These were really fun to make and taste great! Some special people are getting some of these today (lucky!).

If I don't manage to blog before Christmas...

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thanks for reading!

 

Beautiful Christmas Shortbread Biscuits

Easy to make, even easier to eat! 

So I've never made shortbread before and its quite a nice Christmas biscuit to make so I thought I would give it go. When I found a recipe online, I couldnt believe how little goes into these biscuits and how easy they are to make! You only need caster sugar, butter and plain flour!

So I baked a batch of different Christmas shapes again, but this time decorated them with royal icing.

Instead of spending loads of time making up different colours of royal icing, I thought I would just stick with a nice plain wintery white.

I think it gives a nice clean finish to the biscuits!

I didnt use any patterns for the decoration, I just used my imagination (which is probably why I had so much fun decorating them!). I would definently make these again, they are SO tasty and so easy to make! I cant really believe how much shops charge for shortbread when there is hardly anything to them!

Thanks for reading!

 

Stained Glass Biscuits

Practising New Techniques

Hello! Sorry its been a while, I've been busy recently (shocking I know!). I decided to try something a little different this time and make some stained glass effect biscuits. These are quite easy to make!

I wanted to make some Christmas biscuits so I used some round and snowflake shaped cutters and cut out some chocolate biscuit dough. I then used a smaller star shape and pointed shape (not sure what it was, looks a bit like a squashed star) to make holes in the biscuits. I then smashed (extremely good as a stress relief) some lollipops (or you can use hard boiled sweets) and filled these holes with the crumbs!

When the biscuits go in the oven (for about 9 minutes at 180C), the sweet crumbs melt and form a lovely stained glass effect in the middle of the biscuit!

I also made some huge heart ones!

 

I think they turned out pretty well! However, some of them had little bits of biscuit trapped in the sugar! I think this may have been caused by the cocoa powder melting when the sugar got really hot. Next time I think I will try using a gingerbread recipe instead and see if that makes a difference! 

In the next few days I will be updating again with some more Christmas biscuits, so stay tuned!

 

 Thanks for reading!

Cupcakes and Cookies

Improvements

I enjoyed making and eating the chocolate orange cupcakes so much I thought I would make another batch of them! This time, instead of using chocolate buttercream (which was a bit too heavy) I used chocolate ganache (single cream and plain chocolate, melted, cooled and whipped up). This gave a lovely light finish to the cupcake rather than having a heavy topping that sits in your stomach!

Now that I have learnt the basics of making and decorating cakes, I thought I would experiment a bit. 

I baked a small amount of chocolate biscuit recipe and used some small cookie cutters to make some little biscuits which I thought would make great cupcake toppers!

I used cocktail sticks to put them in the cakes, but if you are serving them to children, its best to use edible uncooked spaghetti, in case they hurt themselves! 

The cupcakes were covered in chocolate ganache and edible glitter (so pretty!). 

I then iced the little biscuits using royal icing, flooding them with different colours and designs.

My favourite ones are these heart ones! I am really pleased with how they have turned out! I feel like I am slowly getting better at baking :)

Thanks for reading!