Eat This! - Swirly Biscuits

We needed to make some biscuits at quite short notice, and with kids these are the easiest thing in the world, and very satisfying.  You don't need to use cutters (hooray!) and they can play with the dough like playdough.

I feel I should apologise for the rather hideous plate, but as I said these biscuits were for a purpose which shall be revealed in a later post.

3 ingredients:

2oz caster sugar
4oz butter
6oz plain flour.

Couldn't be simpler.

On a side note, I don't spread butter on my bread, but I often need it for cooking (but not often enough to keep it in the fridge).  I keep it in the freezer but then this raises the problem of remembering to get it out in time to warm up before baking time.  Except it doesn't. If you grate frozen butter it warms up super quick and is ready to use in no time. If you aren't using a food processor for the recipe, just use the microwave, no-one wants to grate frozen butter by hand!

OK, cream butter and sugar and mix in flour.  Divide the dough into an appropriate number of balls and let each child choose a colour.  If they're old enough (mine aren't) let them loose with the food colouring.  I highly recommend gel food colourings rather than the liquid ones. You get a much better result and they don't make the dough/icing/whatever too soggy. Wilton do some nice ones which are available in cake decorating shops, Hobbycraft etc. Once the dough is all coloured, squish each ball into a pancake and then pile them up on top of each other.  We did double the recipe here and made two piles with different order of colours to make two kinds of biscuit.

The best idea here is to put a sheet of clingfilm underneath and then one of top.  This makes is easy to roll out and very easy to move it round the table so everyone has a go.

If I'd have thought about it beforehand, I'd have tidied up the kitchen for the photoshoot.  You take us as you find us.

Once it's rolled out (not too thin, somewhere between 5 and 10 mm) you need to roll it into a sausage.  It's pretty hard to take photos of the process when you have 3 kids having fun!

Cover the sausage in clingfilm and put it in the freezer for 10 mins or so until it is solid.
Then the fun bit.  Slice the sausage up (about 5 mm thick) and reveal the swirl!

Bake at gas mark 4 or 5 for 10-15 minutes.

Honestly these are serious fun. I wish all biscuits looked like this!