As promised, today's blogmas is going to be another baking-themed post. I've been really in the mood to bake lately, probably because of all the Christmas food adverts that have been on TV. I've been excited for Christmas dinner all week! And, the buffet we have every Boxing Day. So much food! Today, I made shortbread biscuits and of course I decorated them all Christmassy.
Here are my finished biscuits! I used some of the left over cake decorations from making yesterday's Christmas cupcakes and some blue fondant icing. I attempted to hand-draw some snowflakes, too and although they are rather messy, I still love how they look. Do you want to have a go at making your own Christmas shortbread? Here's what you'll need:
For the shortbread biscuits
125g butter
180g plain flour
55g caster sugar
(optional) a few drops of vanilla flavouring
For the decoration
You can decorate your biscuits however you like but this is what I used :)
125g icing sugar
15ml warm water (but you may need more)
Packet of ready-to-roll fondant icing
Christmas cake sprinkles and characters
How to make the shortbread biscuits
(1) Preheat the oven at 190ºC/ Gas Mark 5
(2) Mix together the caster sugar & butter until it's a light, fluffy mixture
(3) Next, stir in the flour and keep mixing until you have a crumbly mixture
(4) Now you can knead the mixture together into a ball ready to roll
(5) Sprinkle some flour onto the surface you are about to roll out your dough on to prevent it from sticking, as well as the rolling pin too.
(6) Roll out the dough until it's around 1 & a half cm thick and cut out any shaped biscuits you want
( I wanted circular biscuits but didn't have a cookie cutter so I used a glass. I really need to buy a circular cutter! haha I did however have a heart cookie cutter so I used the last bit of dough to make 2 little heart biscuits).
(7) Grease a baking tray and place on the biscuits ready to pop into the oven.
The recipe I was following (find it here) said to put the biscuits into a fridge for 20 minutes before baking but since the other recipes I had a peep at didn't include this step, I decided to just bake my biscuits straight away.
(8) Bake your biscuits until they are light golden brown, for 15-20 minutes.
How I decorated my shortbread biscuits
For the icing covered biscuits, place the icing sugar into a mixing bowl and gradually mix in 15ml of warm water, adding a little bit each time and stirring. It says on the box that you may have to add more water and I did have to use more, I used around 30ml altogether. Then simply, spread the icing sugar on top of your biscuits and add any decorations you want.
For the blue snowflake biscuits, I used ready-to-roll fondant icing. Sprinkle a little icing sugar (or you could use flour if you don't have any icing sugar) to stop it sticking to the surface and roll out as you did with the shortbread dough for the biscuit preparation. Then, use cookie cutters to cut shapes out of the fondant. I used the same glass I used to cut out my circular biscuits so that the icing would fit perfectly on top. I then decided to make another batch of icing sugar and using a knife, draw a snowflake onto four of my biscuits.
Here are some close up photos of my shortbread biscuits ♥
Just after taking these photos, I couldn't resist eating one of the snowflake biscuits. It was delicious!
I hope you enjoyed reading
♥
What's your favourite kind of biscuit? Have you ever make shortbread?
