Recipe | Christmas vanilla cookies

Here’s my attempt at some festive baking! A selection of lovely vanilla biscuits with some cute decorations.

I found the basic recipe for these biscuits at BBC Good Food.

Of course, how many biscuits this mixture makes depends on the size of your cutter and how thickly you roll the dough. The original recipe said these quantities would make 20 biscuits, but I made 60!

Ingredients (20 – 60 biscuits, apparently…)

140 g/ 5 oz icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg yolk
250 g/ 9 oz butter, cut into small cubes
375 g/ 13 oz plain flour

Method

Mix together the icing sugar, vanilla extract, egg yolk and butter until you have a smooth mixture. Add the flour and mix until you have a firm dough.

You can chill the dough until you’re ready for use it. Shape it into two flat discs, wrap in cling film and refrigerate (see photo below). I would advise removing the dough from the fridge at least 10 minutes before you want to roll it so it doesn’t crack.

Pre-heat the oven to 160 degrees C/ 320 F (the original recipe said 190, but I found this meant the biscuits cooked too quickly, browning too much around the edges). Roll out your dough on a floured surface and use whatever cutters you like to cut out the biscuits. Put them on baking trays lined with baking paper. Bake for 10-15 minutes until light brown.

Put the biscuits on a wire rack to cool. To make the icing add a little water to icing sugar to make a thick icing which won’t run off your biscuits. You can add a little food colouring to your icing and use a piping bag and tip (or shop-bought writing icing in tubes) to make different designs.

I outlined all the biscuits using white water icing, piping it around the edges using a number 1 piping nozzle. Once you’ve given the biscuits a “border” of icing and let it set, you can spread the coloured icing into the centre of the biscuits with a spoon and the point of a knife or a toothpick.

I decorated the trees with white water icing and then covered them in green sugar sprinkles. Finally I used purple sugar balls for baubles. The round biscuits are also covered in white icing and red sugar sprinkles.

I used orange coloured icing for the gingerbread men and then black and red writing icing for their buttons, eyes and smiles. I used pink icing for the hearts and purple for the stars.

Now I’m just going to bombard you with various pictures!