Lemon Biscuits

The aforementioned housewarming was a success, with many people coming and a very impressive quantity of cake was eaten. Thankfully I had help in creating much of the cake on Friday night (though I didn't go to bed until 3am finishing off the macaroons!) and some very lovely people did an awful lot of washing up during, and after the event!

Recipes! I made lots of things - scones, rock cakes, chocolate cake (an excellent squidgy Mary Berry recipe), macaroons, ginger/golden syrup cake, lemon biscuits and other things I can't quite remember….

For the macaroons I used a recipe I got off someone else's brilliant blog. This can be found if you google 'power to the bauer, chocolate macaroons'. Her blog gives all the tips you need, and they are extremely scrumptious. They also improve over 24 hours, and you can even freeze them if you want (though freeze them before you fill them). 

I have since watched Raymond Blanc's Kitchen Secrets this week and decided to have a go at making his version of chocolate macaroons - it requires me to make Italian meringue though (where you add egg whites to hot sugar/water mix) so I need a sugar thermometer! I'll let you know how it goes!

So, I thought in this one I'd give you the recipe for the lemon biscuits that I made, because they were yummy - kinda like lemon shortbread, but there were a few things I didn't get quite right.

Lemon Biscuits, BBC Good Food

325g plain flour

200g butter, chilled

125g golden caster sugar

1 lemon - zest and juice

2 egg yolks

200g icing sugar. 

1. Sift flour and add butter, rub together to produce breadcrumb-like mix

2. Add sugar, lemon zest and yolks and process together

Roll out to 5mm thick

Bake for 15-20 mins at 180C

Use the lemon juice to mix with the icing sugar and drizzle over biscuits artistically after they've cooled. 

Tips: 

Mine ended up a little funny and quite brown around the edges. I think the key is to process it better at the second stage. I found that there was a lot of breadcrumbs to egg yolks, but you need to try and mix it all together. I rolled it out too soon and it kept falling apart, but next time I'd mix it together better and make it into more of a dough. The second set that I cut out came out better because it had come together more as a dough. 

Also, check after 10 mins as some of mine were a little too brown and they should only just start going pale brown around the edges,

Anyway, pretty easy and really nice, light, shortbread-y biscuit. Also, it has the advantage that you don't need to chill it half way through making it like normal biscuits!

I'm afraid that once again I failed to take photos, I must start doing that more! Hope you enjoy making them though :)