30th Birthday Lemon & White Chocolate Biscuits

These sparkly little biscuits were, no surprise, for a 30th birthday party a couple of weeks. The lucky lady in question is a big lover of all things sparkly, particularly pink and purple, and I’m sure there was a squeal of excitement when she saw them!

I used an adaptation of the rich biscuit recipe from my Be-ro book for the base, you can find it online here.

To offset the sweetness of the icing, I added more lemon as follows, and also used plain flour instead of the recommended self raising, so the shapes wouldn’t spread too much.

Ingredients

225g plain flour

100g caster sugar

100g butter

1 lemon, juice and grated rind

1 egg, beaten

Method

– Mix the flour and sugar together, and rub in the fat until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs

– Mix in the lemon juice and rind, and add the egg a little at a time. Keep stirring after every addition of egg, and stop when you have a stiff dough. There may be a little egg left over

– Refrigerate for at least half an hour before cutting into shapes; roll out thinly on a well-floured surface

– Bake at 180 degrees for 10-15 minutes (depending on the size of your shapes), until they are just going brown at the very edges

– Remove and allow to cool completely before icing

I chose to ice my biscuits with a great new discovery – Renshaw’s white chocolate fondant icing.

I’ve not seen in this in the shops before so think it may be new, although I am not always the most observant! In any case I’m very happy to have discovered it, I love using normal chocolate fondant as it adds a real flavour that normal ready-to-roll doesn’t, but is really simple to use.

To cover the biscuits, I cut out matching shapes, using a size smaller cutter than the biscuit dough, and ‘glued’ them on with a quick brush of golden syrup.

For the ’30’ numbers, I coloured up a little fondant in both pink and purple, cutting out big chunky numbers. These were then brushed with a good amount of edible glitter – no such thing as too much sparkle – and left to set overnight, before applying to the biscuits the next morning.

The ‘plain’ white biscuits were simply made by pressing number cutters into the fondant after it had been stuck on the biscuit, and in-filling with, you guessed it, more edible glitter!

They went down really well at the party, with lots of interested comments about the white chocolate fondant. The flavour worked really well with the lemon and it’s definitely something I’ll be using again!

This post is part of #greatbloggersbakeoff2014 – read more over on Jenny’s blog.