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!

Vintage Tea Time Treats

Patience and Perseverance

The cookies I flooded last week didn't turn out as I wanted them to and I want to practice as much as I can because I really like the effect Royal Icing gives. So I flooded some more cookies (of different shapes this time) and left them to dry over night so that they went hard.

I chose some pale "vintage" colours which I thought would work well with the cookie shapes. I then iced them in white royal icing in different designs. Although they are not perfect, I am much happier with these cookies than I am with my last ones!

The three cookies below are my favourites. All the cookies are made to the same recipe as last time, but I put some more chocolate chips in. This unfortunately made the mixture more difficult to work with and thus the cookies turned out different thicknesses! Also, some of the cookies didn't have enough icing on them when they were flooded (I was being extra careful this time), so next time I will make sure the icing is as easily spread as possible.

My piping is getting better, but I need to work slower in order to get neater lines!

 Thanks for reading!

 

Learning to flood biscuits...the hard way!

Chocolate Chip Delights

So I said I was going to make some chocolate chip cookies and I did! I used a recipe from a magazine I picked up that adapts a sugar biscuit recipe. These cookies are so ideal for decorating as they are flat and taste great! I wanted to practice flooding this time using royal icing. This is where you use icing to create a hard outline and wait for it dry. Then you thin the icing down with water and fill in the area which you have outlined. It gives a lovely even and shiny finish!

  Planning Ahead 

I decided I best plan ahead and think up some designs for my biscuits first, so I know what colours I  needed to make my chosen designs. I tried to think up designs that were more child orientated and less "girly" like my last biscuits. I want to challenge myself so I thought I would jump in at the deep end. I had varying levels of success!

The Good, Bad and the Ugly

 

Flooding the base layer of the biscuits was easy enough, but it took about 2 hours to dry! I found out that I need to work on my piping skills, as the lines around the biscuits were a bit wobbly! The real difficulties came when adding more icing and flooding on top of these base layers. On a couple of biscuits I put too much icing in the area where I wanted to flood and the icing went over the outlines I had made! But now I know not too add too much icing. 

I had a lot of problems making black icing as you have to add a lot of food colouring to get a really dark black to white icing. In the end my icing turned too runny and my mickey and minnie designs didnt turn out very well! I was pleased with the cartoon 'bang' designs though!

The whole process made me really understand how to flood biscuits, the limitations of it and the advantages of it. In the future I will probably stick to using three colours as there is too many nozzles and piping bags to change otherwise! Also I would probably stick to simpler designs to being with, using different designed cookie cutters and then piping one design on top in thick icing. :)

 

Practicing Sugar Craft

Pretty In Pink

  

Right after I went shopping for some new cake decorating bits, I baked some lemon biscuits using a recipe from BBC GoodFood. The recipe uses lemon curd in between two discs of dough and they tasted delicious! However, they weren't flat enough for me to practice icing, so I baked some without lemon curd in the middle.

I practiced mixing sugar paste and getting different colours together. I really liked the pale vintage colours I managed to mix up, this was easy to do with a large amount of white sugar paste! I used various cutters, but as you can see my favourite cutter was the butterfly one, I think I will buy some flower cutters next! Sugar paste is very easy to work with and I can see why lots of bakers use it, but I also want to practice the harder aspects of cake decorating.

I made up some royal icing using SliverSpoon powder (add water and whisk). I then copied a pattern from a book my mum gave me and pin pricked it onto the sugar paste base. Then I carefully iced on the butterfly onto the biscuit.

I really love how this one turned out! It did take me a while to do and its not perfect, but its a start!













I also practiced making sugar paste roses, this took me a while to achieve! I watched several different videos on YouTube but settled on one which uses a simple method of rolling out a tube of sugar paste, flattening it and then making petals with your finger. You then just roll up the flattened tube and pull out the petals!

Next time I am going to bake some double chocolate chip cookies and practice more icing techniques!

Thanks for reading!