I am trying to catch up with my Easter Baking write-ups before Easter is all too soon, over so here is another quick review, this time of my Easter biscuit experiments. The money shot is of course the ones that found themselves dipped into chocolate so I will start with these:
The base biscuit is a plain sugar cookie (recipe link later). Once baked and cooled each cookie is then topped with a thin layer of marzipan (all the better if a high almond content marzipan can be used) which has been decorated by pressing a texture sheet or rolling pin over the surface first. The marzipan layer is cut out using the same cutters as the biscuits and then stuck to the biscuit by a thin layer of jam. I used a sieved cherry jam but apricot would be another good flavour. The biscuits are then 'carefully' dipped into a pool of tempered chocolate so that the chocolate coats just up to the edge of the marzipan layer. Eyes are added at the end. If you are making these for marzipan haters then decorate them with rolled fondant icing instead. The icing can be coloured which adds a lot more interest to the presentation.
Well, this chocolate dipping was fun but a rather messy business as plunging whole biscuits into a pool of chocolate whilst keeping them on the fork is a bit of an art that I have not yet mastered. They are very keen to hop off the dipping fork when they shouldn't and my clumsy dipping fork action also meant I was dribbling chocolate around rather too liberally and 'streaking' across the top of what started as perfectly dipped biscuits. So having managed about a dozen 'good' ones I gave up and decided plain biscuits were actually very good too!
The recipe makes a huge number of cookies but the baked cookies keep incredibly well. I have recently used a volume-to-weight-calculator-for-the-kitchen/ downloaded from Blog site Khymos to enable me to convert the recipe from american cups/spoons to grams. This also makes scaling the recipe very easy too, if you do not want a full batch. If you are often put off American baking recipes by the need to measure out your butter in tablespoons do give this download a go.
The cookie dough is quite versatile and I made a batch of it into chocolate chip cookies by simply kneading in a good handful of chocolate chips to the raw dough and then resting it for 30 minutes before rolling and baking. It is not so easy to get clean/sharp edges to the cookies once you have added 'chunks' but these are very tasty variations.
The texturing can be added directly to the cookie dough before baking as so long as the impression is reasonably deep. I had better results with my texture sheet than the rolling pin but I am sure that was just because the particular pin I used made quite a shallow indentation to the dough.
I have a large rabbit cutter that looks quite cute with a halved marshmallow pressed on to the baked biscuit to give a bunny tail. Much easier than trying to pipe a bunny face!
It also seems very appropriate for the April Biscuit Barrel Challenge as this month they are focusing on FUN. More information for biscuit lovers can be found on Laura's blog I'd Much Rather Bake Than
Oh these biscuits are just adorable and although the chocolate dipped ones with marzipan are my favourite, I can imagine how fiddly they would be. The sheep are super cute too. I haven't used my rolling pin yet, but it's not sounding good from what you say. Thanks for entering these into WSC :)
ReplyDeleteOh these are such beauties! And that combination you have of the biscuit/marzipan/chocolate sounds incredible. A brilliant Easter treat
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