Recipe | Butter and jam thumbprint biscuits

A perfect bake if you’re looking for something to make with children 🙂

I wanted to make something with my son and, after some Googling, I came across this simple biscuit recipe. It calls for jam to be used in the centre, but I made half the biscuits with jam centres and half with chocolate hazelnut spread centres.

Ingredients (makes approx. 50 biscuits)

270 g / 9.5 oz plain flour
0.5 tsp baking powder
190 g / 7 oz butter
150 g / 5.5 oz sugar (the original recipe calls for granulated sugar. I only had caster sugar and it worked fine)
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla essence
Some jam and/or chocolate spread (you could probably use peanut butter too!)

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 biscuits in two batches.

Sift the flour and baking powder into a bowl. Mix.

In another bowl, beat together the butter and sugar. Best to use a mixer or electric hand beaters because you need to beat the butter and sugar for a few minutes until fluffy. Add the vanilla essence and egg and continue to beat until the ingredients have combined. Now add half the dry ingredients and mix in slowly. Finally add the second half of the dry ingredients and stir until you have a smooth dough.

Shape the dough into small balls. This is the fun bit to do with children. Try to get the dough balls 2 cm (or about an inch if you prefer imperial) in diameter. You can roll them in some sugar if you like (optional extra sweetness!). This does help counteract any dough stickiness.

Put the balls on a baking sheet, making sure to leave at least an inch between them. I included a random teaspoon in the following picture to give you an idea of scale!

Make a depression in the middle of each of the dough balls using your thumb. The following picture shows the ones my son did!

And these are the slightly neater ones I made:

Fill the depressions in your biscuits with jam (strawberry, raspberry… whatever flavour you prefer) or chocolate hazelnut spread. I used a teaspoon to gently drop the jam in. This is a fiddly job which is probably best done by an adult.

Bake for 10-15 minutes until the edges are golden. Remove from the oven, leave to cool on the tray for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire cooling rack.

Store your finished biscuits in an airtight container. They may not look like much but they are surprisingly moreish.

Given how much I like chocolate, I was surprised to find I preferred the jammy centres. The sharp sweetness of the raspberry jam goes really well with the butter flavour of the biscuits.