Recipe | Melting moments: custard powder and icing sugar butter cookies

Melt in your mouth butter cookies made with custard powder (really) and icing sugar

Ideally I wanted to use my mum’s recipe for these because the results are always terrific. But she was on holiday, so I had to rely on my old friend, the internet. I got the recipe from Now Add Sugar, where you can also find helpful “cup” quantities for the ingredients rather than grams and ounces.

Ingredients (makes approx. 50 biscuits)

300 g / 10.5 oz butter
120 g / 4 oz icing sugar
150 g / 5 oz custard powder
280 g / 10 oz plain flour
1 tsp vanilla essence

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C (or 160 if you have a fan oven)/ Gas Mark 4 / 350 degrees F. Grease and line two baking sheets with greaseproof paper. I had to reuse each of my sheets twice, baking the custard powder biscuits in two batches.

Sift the icing sugar, flour and custard powder together. Mix.

Add the butter and vanilla essence and mix. You can do this by hand, rubbing the dry ingredients into the butter, or you can use a mixer until you have a smooth dough. If you feel your dough is too dry to be able to work with, add a little milk to the custard cookies mixture.

Shape the dough into small balls. If you want to get your custard powder biscuits roughly the same size, you can weigh the dough you use in each ball. I tried to use approx. 20 g of dough in each. Put the balls on a baking sheet, leave at least an inch between them.

Use a fork to press down the top of each of the dough balls.

Now bake for about 10 minutes. Keep an eye on them. Depending on your oven, they may need a few more minutes. They can start to burn quite quickly. You want to get them out when they are lightly brown. A few of mine were a bit too dark (they still taste good though!).

Put the cooked custard powder biscuits onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Store your finished melting moments in an airtight container. These custard powder cookies are a buttery treat which, after an initially satisfying crunch, melt away in your mouth.