Recipe | Easy chocolate biscuits – a Valentine’s Day baking idea!

Cute Valentine’s Day chocolate biscuits from only four ingredients!

A quick search for easy chocolate biscuit recipes turned up this one over at allrecipes. The original recipe suggested rolling the dough into small balls and pressing them down with a fork before baking. I went a little fancier in my decoration in honour of Valentine’s Day. But whether you make your chocolate biscuits heart-shaped or not, you’ll only need four ingredients.

Ingredients (makes approx. 12 biscuits – double up if you have hordes to feed!)

100 g / 3.5 oz margarine or butter
50 g / 1.7 oz caster sugar
100 g / 3.5 oz self-raising flour (plus a little for dusting your board/rolling pin/biscuit cutters)
1 tbsp cocoa powder

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C (160 fan)/ Gas Mark 4 / 350 degrees F. Grease and line two baking trays with greaseproof paper.

Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. If using an electric mixer or hand beaters, this should take 2-3 minutes.

Sift the flour and cocoa powder together. Add to the butter and sugar mix and stir until combined into a soft dough.

At this point, how difficult you make things for yourself if up to you. You can simply divide the dough into twelve, roll each piece into a ball, place them on the baking tray and flatten them slightly using a fork.

Or, you can divide your dough, roll these smaller pieces out and cut them into shapes using cookie cutters. With Valentine’s Day coming up, I decided to use my heart-shaped cutters. I also decided to debut the fantastic cookie stampers which Secret Santa got me.

A warning: the dough is soft and sticky. If you’re going to roll it and cut it out, you’ll need to flour your surface and cutters generously.

Put your raw chocolate biscuits onto your baking trays and bake for 10-15 minutes until they have started to brown and are firm round the edges.

Take the chocolate biscuits out of the oven and leave to cool on the tray for about 5 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling completely.

As I’d stamped my chocolate biscuits, I decided to “colour in” the letters with icing. I used white water icing (icing sugar plus water), piped through a small writing tip. I put a bit of red food colouring into some of the icing to decorate the hearts.