Cliff Richard Biscuits

Whilst it's hard to make out the recipe below as it is caked in mess, these are Cliff Richard Biscuits. To cut a long story short, the name came after they were served at tea to Cliff Richard when he visited my grandfather's vicarage. They are soft brown sugar biscuits with a crunchy sugar coating around the edge.

As with any biscuit recipe, first cream the butter (6oz) and soft light brown sugar (4oz) together until light and fluffy. 

 Before adding in 8oz of plain flour and pinch of salt to make a firm (but sticky) dough. Then lightly flour the surface (but be careful not to over do it with the flour as once you have worked it all into the biscuits they will become tough) and lightly knead the biscuit dough before rolling it into a long sausage.

 Take a long stripe of foil (the length of mine changes every time but the recipe recommends 18 inches by 6) before sprinkling brown demerara sugar over it. 

Then take the biscuit dough and place it on top of the sugar, gently rolling it to make sure all sides are coated in sugar before wrapping it up in the foil. Then it needs to go into the fridge until firm, whilst this is a bit tedious I have tried to do it without this step and it just ended up being very messy. 

Once out of the fridge, you can begin cutting thr roll into biscuits (this isn't as easy as it sounds as you have to be careful not to squash the dough when cutting it). The biscuits should therefore be a lot rounder than mine but I think I might have squished it too much (woops!).

These are delicious when they first come out of the oven hot. And I'm sure Cliff Richard would agree, with a fresh pot of tea.

Custard Creams

Custard Creams are arguably one of my favourite biscuits and tend to be eaten a pack at a time. So I thought I'd try making them myself, whilst nothing can compare to the real McCoy (in my opinion anyway), they were very close! I used a recipe I found on 'The Boy Who Bakes' blog.

The recipe is very simple to follow; combine the plain flour (225g), custard power (50g) and icing sugar (30g) together before adding in the cubed butter (175g) - I must point out that the recipe requires a electric mixer, I tried to combine it by hand but it proved impossible as it was too dry, therefore I added milk to make it into a dough. Then once you have mixed it into a dough it is ready to go into the fridge for half an hour. 

Then once the dough has rested in the fridge, you can begin rolling it out. They don't need long in the oven (about 15 minutes) so keep an eye on them to make sure they don't burn.

Whilst these are cooling (it's important they have cooled before piping the icing into the middle as the butter will melt) you can make the custard butter icing by combining butter (50g), icing sugar (200g) and custard power (2tbsp). A little bit of milk may also be needed to bring the dry ingredients together again - however be careful not to add too much as you still want it to be a thick icing (similar to the original biscuit).

Then place it into a piping bag and pipe a big blob into the middle of one of the two biscuits before sandwiching them together.

Then all that's left is to put the kettle on.

P.s Thank you PrintSmitten for my lovely new Bake Off tags!

Christmas Biscuits

Making and decorating Christmas biscuits is my favourite pre-Christmas activity. The BBC Food recipe I use makes vanilla biscuits but to make them taste more Christmassy I add mixed spice.

Cream the butter and sugar together, add the egg and vanilla essence (and mixed spice) until combined. Then add in the flour to form the dough. 

Then you can raid the cupboard for Christmas cutters you probably last used when you were five years old.

Then once they have cooled on a wire rack its time to start decorating!

...And tah-dah, with a touch of glitter and some icing, you've got Christmas biscuits!

EAT ME biscuits

Nothing beats a good biscuit, especially one that's so easy to make it only has 5 ingredients and takes 5 minutes to prep and 15 to bake. 

I used the BBC GoodFood Basic biscuit dough to make these yummy buttery biscuits as it's exactly what it says on the tin.

They proved to be the perfect gift once I'd stamped them with an 'EAT ME' stamp and sprinkled some (edible) glitter over the top of them.