Food Friday ~ Easter Biscuits

Friday, March 23, 2012

Happy Friday everyone!  Jenelle here, with my first ever Food Friday post… a bit daunting really, given all the culinary talents of our wonderful team here at the Shabby Shoppe, but I will give it a whirl and see how we go!!  I do love to bake and my kids are always at hand to crack the eggs, mix the ingredients, lick the beaters and do a taste test.  Thus,  my end product always looks a bit ‘rustic’ shall we say, but I do believe the process is the best part and we always have fun together in the kitchen as we go.

So, with Easter fast approaching, I thought it would be a fun activity to bake and decorate some biscuits (a.k.a. cookies) with my kids.  We have a huge collection of plastic cookie cutters in our cupboards, so we sorted through them all and found some that would suit our Easter theme!  Here’s a photo of our finished biscuits, then I’ll talk you through how you can make some too.

One of my ‘golden rules’ when cooking in the kitchen with the kids, is to make sure I am all prepared before I even tell them we’re going to be cooking!  Otherwise they get far too excited and can’t wait to start while I am still running around trying to get everything out, find ingredients and more often than not I have my head stuck in the Tupperware cupboard and eggs starts cracking on the floor behind me!

So here’s what you’ll need to have out and ready to make these yummy Easter Biscuits.

• Mixing bowl
• Food processor
• Baking/Parchment paper
• Rolling pin
• Sieve
• Cookie cutters
• Piping bags
• Tea towels for sticky hands
• Baking trays lined with baking paper
• Wire cooling rack

Ingredients

• 175 grams (6oz) unsalted butter
• 200 grams (7oz) caster sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 1 and a half teaspoons vanilla essence
• 375 grams (13oz) plain flour
• Royal Icing to decorate (or any store bought icing/frosting you can pipe onto your biscuits)
• A variety of confectionery/sweets for decoration

Hands are washed, equipment and ingredients are ready, so now it’s time to start baking!

1. Line 2 baking sheets/cookie trays with parchment/baking paper.
2. Blend the softened butter, sugar and vanilla essence in a food processor until smooth (I used the plastic blade on my food processor, but check the settings in your processor’s user guide if you are unsure).
3. Next, add the egg, egg yolk and sifted flour.
4. Process this until it forms into a smooth dough.  I needed to work the dough a little myself on a floured surface to bring it together nicely.
5. Then, wrap the dough in foil/parchment/baking paper and chill in the refrigerator for around 30  minutes.
6. Pre-heat your oven to 175 degrees Celsius (350 degrees Farenheit).
7. Take dough out of fridge and unwrap.  Roll it out onto a lightly floured surface to about a quarter of an inch thickness.  (This got a bit tricky with the kids, but we used our hands a bit  and got there in the end!)
8. Cut out your Easter/Spring shapes (eggs, chicks, bunnies, flowers, butterflies etc) and place them on the baking trays.  I found it easier to flour the cookie cutter each time so it didn’t stick to the dough.
9. Pop them into the oven for around 10-12 minutes, then cool them on a wire rack.

While they are cooling, you can make your icing.  I made a Royal Icing mix that I found here, which uses egg whites.  It came out pure white in colour and adding food colourings also worked well with this mix.  If, however, you would prefer not to use egg whites, I found another recipe mix for Royal Icing here.  I simply scooped the icing into small, plastic zip-lock bags, snipped the corner and piped the icing around the edges of our biscuits.  Before the icing set (royal icing sets hard once air dried), I placed a mixture of sweets on top to help decorate them!  You could use tiny marshmallows for the bunnies’ tails, rainbow choc-chips, sprinkles, cachous, chocolate chips… the list is endless!

Last of all, we had fun bagging up the decorated biscuits to give away as Easter treats.  The Shoppe’s Sprout Confection Collection has some gorgeous tags and neat gift boxes you could use to package up these sweet treats.

Thank you so much for ‘indulging’ me in my first ever Food Friday post!  As a little treat for reading along, I’ve made up a 4×6 recipe card you can grab as a free download.  I used a card from the Shabby Shoppe’s Made from Scratch recipe templates, along with papers from Sprout and some cute stickers from Sprout Easter Additions.  Just click HERE or on the image to download.

I do hope you have a wonderful weekend ~ we’ll see you back here on Monday with our latest Layout of the Week winner.  Have you uploaded to the gallery this past week?  It may just be you!  We are always on the lookout remember!  Until then, happy scrapping everyone!

JenelleFood Stuff, Free (not desktops), Uncategorized 5 Comments