Love-bug sugar cookies.

I've decided that I definitely enjoy making and icing cakes more than biscuits. I think this is due to the fact that the biscuits I made yesterday took way longer than I thought to ice and also because I am not very good at icing them. They never turn out how I imagine they will.

I think this is down to the fact that to make beautifully iced biscuits you need to be patient and neat and those are 2 things I definitely am not.

Any way I had been meaning to make these biscuits on valentines day however as usual time got away from me. But hey heart shaped biscuits should be eaten all year round in my book. Any way here are my Love-bug Iced biscuits. I'm sorry they're not so great and neither is the photography.

They are a basic Vanilla biscuit then I piped a line of thick red icing around the heart cutting off before the tip and I filled this with red flooding icing. I then iced the tip with white icing then once dry decorated with black spots and faces.

Here's how:

For the biscuits:

Makes about 24

350g Plain Flour
100g Self Raising Flour
125g Granulated Sugar
125g Butter Softened and Diced
125g Golden Syrup
1 Large Egg beaten
Pinch of Salt

Sift the flours together into a bowl. Add the sugar and salt and mix well. Add the butter and rub into the mixture with your fingertips until the mix resembles breadcrumbs.
Make a well in the centre and add the egg and syrup. Mix well, drawing any of the flour left at the side of the bowl and stop as soon as a ball has formed.
Roll the dough in between 2 sheets of greaseproof paper (This way doesn't use flour so stops the dough from getting to tough) until it's about 5mm thick. Then chill the rolled out dough in the fridge for about 30mins.

Pre-heat the oven to 170deg C Then cut the the biscuits out and bake on a lined baking tray for about 12  - 15 mins. Once the biscuits are cooled they are ready to ice.

For the outlining icing Mix icing sugar with colour and water (Adding a drop at a time) Until you have icing about the consistency of toothpaste. Then ice this around the edges where required. Then for the flooding icing make the icing to about the consistency of thick custard and pipe inside the outline, spreading out where necessary. Leave to dry until the icing is hard. This can be done by placing the biscuits in the oven on its lowest setting for around 30 minutes. Then decorate with more think piping icing.

And that's it! I did plan to try making a few using flood on flood icing so that the bugs spots were set into the biscuit like the red icing however as I only had one piping bag and a lot of biscuits it was just taking to long and i was still icing at 11pm - (Note to self, organise my time better) They don't look as great as I'd have liked but They still taste pretty great.

Back to cakes next week.

Any way bye for now 

Cupcake Kris
xxx