Baking Braver Biscuits

One of my new years resolutions was to get better at baking biscuits, another one was to blog more often. I haven't done too well at the latter but I haven't done too badly on the biscuits.

I've become a lot more confident baking biscuits and cookies than I used to be. I've also had a lot of help from the food processor I got for Christmas which can whiz up a great cookie batter in about 5 minutes.

I've also been lucky enough to work on the marketing campaign for World Baking Day this year which falls on Sunday 19th May. On www.worldbakingday.com there are 100 different recipes from around the world, each recipe has been donated by someone who loves to bake including bloggers, chefs and patisserie owners. The recipes have been ranked in terms of difficulty from super simple at number 1 to the treacherous and tricky number 100. 

On World Baking Day everyone needs to Bake Brave by challenging themselves to bake something which pushes their baking skills to the next level.

In advance of the day I have been trying out quite a few of the recipes. When it comes to cakes I feel confident choosing some of the more tricky recipes but for the biscuits I am slowly building my confidence.

The first biscuits I tried were cinnamon and chocolate biscuits. These are ranked at Level 13 so relatively easy (in theory).

I was really pleased with how mine turned out. I made them pretty big so I only managed to make 5 but that was fine for me. They were really tasty and I learnt some new decorating techniques.

You can find the full recipe here.

After the success of these biscuits I was ready to push it up a level and attempt Level 32 - Iced Vanilla Bunny Biscuits

The biscuits themselves were really easy to make and the dough was really easy to work with. I think the complexity in this recipe comes from the decoration. Instead of bunnies I made butterflies and instead of plain fondant / sugar paste I used some chocolate ready to roll icing.

The decoration was easier than I had expected and they look quite impressive. The ready to roll icing was easy to work with, you just cut out the shapes using the same cookie cutter you used for the biscuits and then put a bit of the water on the back to make it stick to the biscuit.

I then decorated mine with mini choco beans.

I'm going to continue to challenge myself with new biscuit recipes but for now, here's some more of the biscuits I've baked so far this year.

Vanilla cookies

Homemade Jammie Dodgers

Afghan Biscuits

(see my blog about these here)