Festive Christmas Shortbread Biscuits - DIY Gifts
Edible gifts are the best, especially this time of year. I love giving them, but even better receiving them! My go to biscuit is the humble shortbread which I have spiced up this year with some warm festive ingredients and created my go to stripes and a diamond pattern. I used this shortbread recipe (click on the Biscuits below) and adapted it by adding the food colouring gel to half of the dough (you don't need much!
Ingredients:
150g/4oz unsalted butter, softened
100g caster sugar, plus extra to finish
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp mixed spice
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground cardamom
250g plain flour
Combine all the ingredients to form a dough. Heat oven 190c/170c Fan/Gas.
The Steps:
1. For each style of biscuit you will need an equal part of colour and plain dough - NB you don’t need to use much food colouring gel.
2. Roll out both balls of dough separately to about 5mm thick. For the stripes, cut 5mm wide strips in each colour. Join the strips together (you can brush on milk in between each strip).
3. Gently roll over with a rolling pin to fix the strips and cut out the shapes with your biscuit cutter.
4. To make the diamond pattern, cut out the diamond pattern from the plain dough shapes and pop in a red diamond into the space. Roll over gently to secure in place.
5. Place the biscuits on a parchment covered baking tray and chill in the fridge for 40 minutes before baking, this will help keep the shapes.
Bake for 15-20 minutes, keep an eye on them as you don't want them to brown
Once baked and cooled, serve up on a plate and enjoy! Alternatively wrap them up in some of our luxury tissue paper and ric rac ribbon or patterned paper bag and give as a tasty gift!
