Biscuiteers book of iced biscuits

Little hands & feet

It’s the school half-term holidays here in the UK. Half term=Boredom in our household…Long, dark days of not much to do…
So, what can we do to while away a couple of hours, that’s also sweet and cute? Yup,you’ve guessed it! Bake.
This time, being as I bought a cute little hand cookie cutter from Hobbycraft (To go with the foot cutter which many of us bought a good few years ago now to make Nigella’s cheesy feet of course!) and I, sorry we, were dying to ‘paint’ nails….out came the ‘Biscuiteers’ book again- this time the recipe for coconut biscuits, which again I halved and still finished up with 17-18 biscuits.
We decorated them with nail varnish and jewellery (Well, not really, obviously, just little tubes of ready-made icing.and lots of edible glitter.)
Super cute and just right for the ‘Not-too-sweet-toothed’ amongst us.

350g plain flour
100g SR flour
125g granulated sugar
75g dessicated coconut
125g salted butter, diced
125g Golden syrup
1 large egg, lightly beaten
(This is the recipe before I halved the amounts, so bear that in mind)

Sift the flours together in a mixing bowl, add the sugar and coconut and mix well.
Add the butter, rub together until it resembles fine breadcrumbs.
When all the butter is evenly mixed in, add the syrup and egg.

Cover and chill until ready to use, or cut into shapes, then chill for 20-30 mins.
The biscuiteers advise to roll the dough out between sheets of parchment paper , as adding flour will make the biscuits tough.
I just roll mine out between two sheets of those cooking liners that you can get from most supermarkets. What a great invention, don’t ya think?!
170 Deg C for 14-18 minutes.

Let them cool, then decorate to your heart’s desire, the blingier the better! Ours ended up looking like they belonged to Tulisa from N-Dubz….

Have a heart!

See how pretty?? I don’t know who’s more impressed with these – me, or my 11 year old daughter!
I can’t say that these plain biscuits from ‘the Biscuiteers book of iced biscuits’ where relaxing to make, definitely not! But I do feel like I’ve learnt a good few things from my first attempt at flooding icing.
I used the recipe for plain biscuits, at the beginning of the book, but halved the recipe, I’m glad I did, because I still got 22 heart biscuits from it, imagine if I’d made the lot, we’d have been eating heart biscuits for daaaays!
I also, for the first time, made my own royal icing, which The Biscuiteers use to decorate all their biscuits. Luckily I had some egg white powder at home, because during Christmas my daughter wanted to make some sweets which called for it, I almost threw the box away, because being someone who won’t eat eggs unless they’re thoroughly disguised…it’s vile stuff!
I split the royal icing into three – one bowl I kept white (for the dots) one bowl was tinted rose and one violet, using my new Wilton gel colours!
I found piping round the edges of the biscuits difficult, it’s something I’ve never done before, so could have made a much better job of it, but it’s ok for a first attempt – I need to invest in a new fine tip for my icing set I think.
It took a good while for the royal icing to harden, but it’s probably too warm in my kitchen/living room, so that may be why.
I’ve also found that the icing deepens in colour as it hardens, so next time I’ll make the colours lighter.