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.]