Oh it's been such a long time since we were last together, surrounded by flour and sugar and chocolate chips! May was filled with moving, and June, July and August with holidays. Oh what a troubled life I lead. BUT I am back now, and I have gathered a lot of baking and cooking ideas in America (land of the free, home of the fat) and I cannot wait to share them.
One thing the Americans really do know how to bake is cookies. They are all over it. They have an entire aisle in their shops devoted to cookies of every flavour, shape and size. Their kitchen shops are packed with cookie cutters and so I stocked up on some unusual shapes. Yesterday, as a present for Sal who is a plane geek, I made some spitfire biscuits. It was my first time making biscuit dough that is stiff enough to roll out- my gooey cookies certainly would not survive in a mould. So let's see how they turned out:
The recipe is wonderfully easy and yields a lot of dough so do give this a try.
Ingredients:
175g butter
200g caster sugar
400g plain flour
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2 eggs
Method:
Preheat the oven up to 185 degrees celcius. With shaped biscuits, you don't want the oven too hot or they will swell and lose their shape. Next cream up the butter and sugar. It sometimes help to dice the butter if it's a little hard and then rub it in to the sugar with your fingers at first. Then get a spoon out and bash it around until it is fluffy.
Next you want to beat in the eggs and vanilla. You can do this by hand or with a mixer if you have one. Don't worry that you've made scambled eggs by accident, it's all good. Combine the dry ingredients then throw them in the bowl with the gooey eggs sugar stuff and mix gently. When it's ready, it should not be sticking much to your hands or the spoon. If it is, add more flour until it's smooth.
Grab some cling film and flour it, then divide the dough into two and wrap the balls in the cling film. Stick one in the freezer- that's your dough for the next time you want biscuits. Trust me, having ready-made dough is a wonderful thing. Put the other one in the fridge and go do something else for an hour. When time's up, flour a surface and roll out the dough from the fridge to no thinner than about 1.5cm. The thicker it is, the bigger the biscuit but they may lose their shape if too large. Select your favourite cookie cutter and get busy! Make sure you gather up all the offcuts and roll them out again to make the most of your dough. Feel free to eat any that is leftover (particularly good stirred into ice cream...)
Bake for about ten minutes, or until they are starting to go golden brown around the edges. Cool on a wire rack then make plane noises as you fly one into your mouth.
Ideal!
A x
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