Recipe | Two-layer, jammy heart biscuits

Two-layer, heart-shaped biscuits with a jam centre: an easy Valentine’s bake

I used my easy biscuit recipe to make the dough for these two-layer, heart-shaped biscuits with a jam centre. In addition to the ingredients below, you’ll also need two heart-shaped biscuit/cookie cutters, one about twice the size of the other, as shown in the photo below.

Ingredients (makes 6-8 double-layered, heart-shaped biscuits, depending on how thinly you roll the dough):

75 g/ 2.25 oz butter (at room temperature) or baking margarine
75 g/ 2.25 oz caster sugar
1 egg (medium or large)
1 tbsp milk (you can use whatever milk you have at home)
225 g/ 8 oz plain flour
About 200 g / 7 oz strawberry, raspberry or other red/purple coloured jam or jelly jam of your choice.
Optional: a little icing sugar for final glazing.

Method:

If you have an electric stand mixer or electric hand beaters, use them to make this easier. Beat the butter and sugar together until smooth. Add the milk and egg and mix again until combined. Finally, add the flour and beat until you have a smooth, soft dough.

I recommend wrapping your dough in clingfilm and putting it in the fridge for a couple of hours (you can leave it overnight if you like). This chilling step isn’t essential is you’re in the hurry, but the theory is that the biscuits will hold their shape better and spread out less when baking if the dough has been cooled.

Prepare your baking trays by lining them with greaseproof paper. I used two trays and had to use them more than once. Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees C (160 fan/356 degrees F/Gas Mark 4).

Flour your cutting surface and rolling pin and roll the dough until about 0.3 cm-thick (about a tenth of an inch), but you can go thinner or thicker if you like. First, use the larger of your heart-shaped cutters to cut out as many hearts as you can get from the dough. Put half of these larger “base” hearts onto your baking trays.

With the remaining half of your large hearts, use your smaller cutter to cut out a heart-shaped “window” in their middle. These will be the upper layer of the biscuits. The small heart “windows” you cut out can be baked as well as small heart biscuits, or you can put the dough back together and see if you can get another large biscuit out of it.

Put all the biscuit shapes onto your trays and bake for about 12 minutes. Keep an eye on the biscuits as they can go from “nicely brown” to “not so nicely burnt” very quickly! Remove from the oven and transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Spread a thin layer of jam onto the “base” biscuits. Don’t take the jam too far to the edge or it will squidge out the sides when you put the top later biscuit on. Put the top layer biscuits (the ones with the heart-shaped “windows” cut out of them) on top and press together gently.

You can finish at this stage if you like:

Or you can use a little icing drizzle as a final decorative touch. Mix up some icing using icing sugar and a little water (you won’t need more than 50 g of icing sugar at the very most). Use a spoon to drizzle/flick this across the top of the biscuits. Leave to set.

Store the jammy heart biscuits in an airtight container in a cool, dry place and they should keep for up to 5 days. They will start to go soft quite quicky because of the jam, but they’ll still be delicious!

If you’re looking for other Valentine’s themed recipes, you could try: