School holidays are nearing an end. I didn't think I'd make it this far without holiday club (school during the holidays) or babysitting, but I have. We have. We've done days out, adventures, sleepovers, play dates, painting, slime-making, finger-painting, gardening, swinging and sliding, swimming, crafting and baking.

Oh, the baking.

We've baked everything - bread, this apple cake using our own apples, cakes in various guises, brownies, these cheese scones (a lot), and these chocolate biscuits. It's Nigella's recipe for Granny Boyd's Biscuits. It's available in various places online, but I got mine out of a very well-used copy of How to be a Domestic Goddess. 

They're delicious. Properly yummy melt-in-the-mouth ala chocolate shortbread delicious. The only way that you could improve this recipe would be to add chopped hazelnuts. Finnlay loved these so much that he carried around the airtight container everywhere he went, shaking them with an insistent chant of mama to get my attention so that I might just possibly open up the tub and give him one or two. They didn't last long at all!

Granny Boyd's Biscuits

Ingredients:

300g Self-Raising Flour
30g Cocoa Powder
250g Unsalted Butter (room temperature)
125g Caster Sugar

Method:

• Preheat the oven to 170 degrees C.
• Sieve Flour and Cocoa Powder and set it aside.
• Cream butter and sugar till light and pale in colour.
• Mix in flour mixture, it might look like it needs liquid, but keep working the ingredients in and it will form a dough. [Just keep going. Don't give in to the temptation to add something. It's going to work out, I promise.]
• Roll into walnut-sized balls and arrange these on the baking sheets.
• Flatten these balls with the back of a fork.
• Bake for 5mins at 170 degrees C and then turn the temperature down to 150 degrees C for a further 10-15mins.
• The biscuits should feel firm on top although not hard. Remove from the oven and transfer to cool on wire rack, before storing in air-tight container. [or eat straight away. I won't judge you.]

There is something really satisfying about the humble oat cookie. You only need one or two with a cup of tea to make the whole afternoon that much nicer.


I've tried a lot of different biscuit recipes - from peanut butter squares to healthier veg biscuits - but these ones still come out tops.

It's a tried-and-tested Mary Berry recipe. The Queen of Baking. It's one of those recipes that really just can't go wrong. You can add whatever you like to it - chunks of ginger and cinnamon, perhaps? Bits of cranberries and sultanas? In this batch I added chunks of dark chocolate. The smaller chunks melted, but the big ones stayed mostly in-tact for a gooey chocolate reward. Or, you can just have them plain.

I'm not a heart-skippy, giddy-about-Valentine's-Day kinda gal. But I do like a good biscuit, and what better excuse to use my increasing collection of cookie cutters than Valentine's Day?

















So I made these. They're pretty-in-pink Linzer Heart Sandwich Cookies made using my scalloped circle and miniature heart cookie cutters. I was feeling rather out of inspiration, so I had a look through pinterest for some ideas and happened upon this recipe from Martha Stewart's website for Pecan Linzer Cookies. I changed the shape, as you can see, and I opted for home-made plum jam instead of cherry jam. I also sandwiched half of the cookies with jam, and the other half sandwiched with Nutella chocolate spread.

















They took a really long time to make. I'm a 'fair weather baker' (as Mister Bakercourt always says about football) and I really don't like to fuss over recipes when a simpler one will do. I've made some demanding things in the past (like the prinzregententorte!) and these linzer cookies were on par. You have to make the dough and then refrigerate for 2 hours. Then, you roll it out and refrigerate again for another 20 minutes.















Then you cut out, and bake. I made smaller biscuits than suggested in the recipe (they're just smaller than two inches wide) so it made about thirty biscuits (doubled, like you see above) and about thirty other shapes which I made when I got tired of cutting out scalloped/fluted circles. In between baking, I stored the cut shapes in the fridge. All in all, it took around fifty minutes more to bake the smaller biscuits on one tray at a time in the oven.

After they've cooled down, you need to reduce the jam for the sandwiching and that takes another ten to fifteen minutes in total before you can spread it, so I opted for some other fillings for the extra biscuits to pass the time. For interest's sake, these biscuits are really nice when dipped in melted chocolate!















These are really nutty biscuits (they have almost a cup of pecan nuts in them) and aren't very sweet, so it's important to use a nice filling that adds the right amount of sweetness for the biscuit. I added in a bit of extra sugar when blending with the butter, I doubled the cinnamon like I usually do, and they turned out really nicely. They're ideal for those who don't like double-chocolate-sugar-dipped cookies, but who still like a bit of nutty indulgence with a cuppa.

Here's the recipe again: Martha Stewart's Pecan Linzer Cookies with Cherry Jam

Now, I know I said I'd bake a cake for the sugar roses and share photographs with you but I was a little distracted (forgivably, I think) by these:


Can you handle your excitement at my teapot shortbread biscuits? Maybe it's just me, but there's something so very satisfying about the pastel shades of royal icing on shortbready goodness.






















I made teapots and scalloped circles, miniature heart biscuits and giant hearts. I made some cupcake-shaped biscuits as well but The Mister didn't photograph them.
















I lined the hearts with white piping icing and filled with with a soft lilac icing (you can see in the image above) but they're oh-so-nice without any filling, too.






















And just so you know that I didn't forget you all completely, I whipped up a batch of strawberry swirl sweetheart cupcakes and iced them with light strawberry buttercream. This one is topped with one of the miniature sugar roses I made this weekend.
















You can see the strawberry swirl cake here (a bit) with the layers of vanilla and strawberry sponge showing through the white cases. I used a catering-sized piping nozzle to make nice layered buttercream swirls (yum) and topped with edible roses and glitter.






















I made a selection of pink and white hearts from sugar paste as well, and sprinkled those with pearl dragees (why aren't they just called pearl balls?). I like this one best - simple, pretty and yum. As you can see, I had a bit of buttercream left over so I popped it into one of my icing squeezy bottles and popped on a star-shaped nozzle to pipe little flowers on top of the scalloped circles.






















The roses turned out very well, I think, and they're quite easy to make once you get the hang of them. I love these colours, the two-toned sponge cakes, the almost-transparent edible glitter... I think we found a wedding winner! The only thing now is to figure out how to display the cookies and cupcakes at the actual wedding. Cake stand? Pretty antique plates?

Here's my rather fool-proof sugar biscuit recipe from this website:

Shortbread sugar biscuits

It has, once again, been an awfully long week. We've spent the weekend working, fussing, cleaning and doing wedding plans - yes, wedding plans - and we're trying to make the basic decisions that let everything just fall into place. Hopeful. So, while the world is rushing full-speed around us, we have to take a few moments out and have a cup of tea - and a biscuit.

I baked some of Rachel Allen's 'Mocha Kisses', but my heart-shaped cookie cutter is decidedly bigger, so I'm renaming them 'Mocha Smooches'.






















Aren't they lovely, large biscuits?

















Here's an up-close picture for you. I love the way the dough cracked around the edges; little ridges of crystallised sugar. I think this is a reaction to all the sugar used to keep the dough down on the table and off of the rolling pin: I've never worked with such sticky dough before! You have to dust your working surface with icing sugar to avoid the sticking, and, because this dough is so ridiculously clingy, you end up using about a cup of icing sugar just to stop it from bonding with the rolling pin. Hm.

















But they're rather nice when they're iced, aren't they? I iced them with a chocolate-mocha butter icing. That's a new plate for my Pretty Plate Collection, from IKEA.

Here's Rachel's recipe from the BBC website: