By Sarah Stephens 730AM GMT eighteen March 2010
Easter biscuits Photo LAURA HYND (Makes 24)
Fiona Cairns"s beginner"s guide to baked sweat bread decorating Get beach-fit in fourteen days Nougat ice-cream with oranges Royal Garden, Kensington, London Hotel Guru British anniversary dishes gooseberry and basil ice-cream with almond biscuits recipe Gay penguins back a chicky in German zoo370g solid flour
250g unsalted butter, diced
125g golden caster sugar
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla extract
100g dim or divert chocolate,
broken in to pieces
biscuit cutters (I used a rabbit, an egg and a chick, each 7-8cm long)
Sift the flour and half a teaspoon of salt in to a play and set aside. Cream together the butter and sugarine in a large bowl, utilizing a wooden ladle or a mixer, until well total and fluffy. Add the egg yolk and vanilla and brew well, afterwards work in the flour. Once the reduction comes together as a dough, dust your hands with flour and hang it in adhere film. Chill for an hour (or up to a couple of days if some-more convenient) or freeze for up to a month. This mix can differently be wily to work, generally in prohibited continue or a comfortable kitchen.
Preheat the oven to 180C/gas symbol 4. Roll out the mix utilizing copiousness of flour (it is utterly sticky) to 3-4mm thick. Cut out the biscuits with your selected cutters and lay them on dual baking sheets lined with parchment. Make holes towards the tip of each with a skewer for threading by the ribbon. Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until dark gold. Cool on a handle rack, re-forming the badge holes with the skewer.
To decorate
700g white sugarpaste
1 pot yellow food colour paste
1 pot immature food colour pulp
1 pot pinkish food colour paste
250g parcel stately icing
6m phony badge for hanging
Divide the sugarpaste in to 3 and place in apart polythene bags. Leave one white for the rabbits, colour one dark yellow for the chicks and the alternative dark immature for the eggs. Colour the sugarpaste, as per the roses recipe above, the day prior to you need it.
On a purify work aspect dusted with topping sugar, hurl out the white sugarpaste to about 2mm thick. Cut out with the rabbit cutter, creation as most as you have rabbit biscuits.
Make the stately topping according to the parcel instructions, order in to three, colour yellow, immature and pinkish as per the sugarpaste roses recipe on top of and put in to piping bags.
Pipe a small stately topping on to the biscuit and hang on the sugarpaste rabbit. Make a hole in the sugarpaste in the same place as that on the biscuit for the ribbon. Repeat with the yellow sugarpaste on the chicks and the immature for the eggs.
Pipe pinkish dots on the rabbit, an ear and an eye, a pinkish eye for the chicky and yellow patterns on the egg. Allow the sugarpaste and topping to set overnight. Cut the badge in to 25cm lengths and thread by each biscuit.
