A Recipe - Snowflake Biscuits

Baking is one of my favourite things to do at Christmas time and there are certain recipes that I come back to every year. This is one of them, so I thought I would share it with you.

Snowflake Biscuits :

This recipe makes roughly 30 - 40 biscuits depending on the size of your cutters.

Ingredients :

125g caster sugar

250g unsalted butter ( at room temperature )

1 egg yolk ( white not needed )

1 tsp vanilla extract

300g plain flour

icing sugar ( for decorating )

Method :

Cream together the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl until smooth and fluffy.
Add the egg yolk to the mixture and beat for around 1 minute.
Add the flour, mixing with a wooden spoon until it starts to come together, then you may need to use your hands to mould it into a ball of dough.
If it is too sticky, add a little more flour to your dough. When you are happy with it, wrap in clingfilm and chill for about an hour in the fridge.
Whilst your dough is chilling, pre-heat the oven to 180c / 350f/ gas 4 and prepare your baking trays (line them with grease proof paper ).
Remove dough from the fridge, unwrap and roll out on to a floured surface. I like my dough to be reasonably thin, as it seems to hold the shape better - around 5mm. When you have it to this thickness, dip your cutter in flour and then cut out your shapes. I have used snowflake cutters but you could use whatever you fancy - stars, Christmas trees, animals etc.
Arrange the biscuits about 3cm apart on your trays. I added a small hole to the top of some of my biscuits - just using a cocktail stick ( I’m planning on hanging some up ). Then place in a heated oven for 8 - 10 minutes. If you are making bigger biscuits you might need 10 - 12 minutes but for small ones they should cook fairly quickly. You want them to be a light golden colour.
Once cooked, remove from the oven and set aside on wire racks to cool.
Whilst waiting for them to cool make your icing, just by adding water to icing sugar to get a thick enough consistency for piping.
Now it’s time to decorate! I use a piping bag to pipe a pattern around my biscuits, going edge to edge in a line and then adding a little arrow to each end. If you don’t want to pipe you could just dip the biscuits in icing or chocolate.
Once set, you can add string to your biscuits with holes in, hang them off the Christmas tree or off a stick like I have - I’ll show you below…

You can see the holes I put in some of the biscuits in the photo above.

Here’s what I did with them next…

I used the same stick from our last blog post, adding a little more grenery to it, then I simply hung the biscuits using a thin string. I love the look of it! Like snowflakes falling. And to add even more drama… I added a gingerbread house to the mix!