Recipe | Two-tone heart and flower biscuits

Pretty two-tone heart and flower-shaped biscuits. Ready for afternoon tea!

I decided it was time I made some biscuits. I find them a lot more effort than cake, which is probably why I don’t make them as often!

I got the recipe from the one and only Mary Berry, here. Her recipe was more elaborate with three rings of colour… I decided to play safe and go for two 🙂

Ingredients (makes approx. 40 biscuits)

60 g / 2 oz plain chocolate (I’m sure you could use dark if that’s your preference)
325 g / 11 oz plain flour
175 g / 6 oz softened butter or margarine
1 tbsp milk
1.5 tsp baking powder
1 egg
150g / 5 oz caster sugar, plus some extra for sprinkling.

Method

I’ll describe the method assuming you’re only going to make heart-shaped biscuits. If you want to make more than one shape, just divide the dough up.

First of all, whatever shape you want your biscuits to be, you’ll need two cutters for each shape, one double the size of the other.

Melt the chocolate. You can either use the microwave (careful not to burn it) or put it in a bowl over a pan of hot water.

If you have a mixer, put the flour, sugar, butter, milk, baking powder and egg into the mixer bowl. Alternatively, if you’re using hand beaters or elbow grease, put the ingredients into a large bowl. Blend them together until you have a smooth dough. You might have to pause a couple of times to scrape the sides of the bowl with a spatula. Shape the dough into a ball using your hands and split in two. Wrap one of the balls of dough in clingfilm and put in the fridge for 2 hours.

Put the other half of the dough back in the mixer and add the melted chocolate. Blend until the chocolate is evenly distributed through the dough. Shape the dough into a ball, wrap in clingfilm and put in the fridge for 2 hours.

Grease and line two large baking sheets with greaseproof paper. I found there wasn’t enough space on two trays and had to use the two trays twice.

Roll out the plain dough on a floured surface to your desired thickness (I’d recommend 3 – 5 mm) and use the larger of your heart-shaped cutters to cut out your biscuits. Put them on the baking tray and back in the fridge to firm up again for about 20 minutes. Repeat this process with the chocolate flavoured dough.

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C / Gas Mark 4 / 355 degrees F.

Take your raw biscuit shapes out of the fridge and use the smaller heart-shaped cutter to cut small hearts out of the middle of the large hearts. Put the small hearts to one side. Put a small chocolate heart into the middle of each of the large plain hearts. Put a small plain heart into the middle of each of the large chocolate hearts.

Sprinkle the biscuits with caster sugar and bake for 10 minutes until the plain dough had gone slightly brown. Transfer to a wire rack to cool. Store in an airtight container.

Here are some of the flower biscuits and heart biscuits just out of the oven: