The recipe for these yummy biscuits is from the BBC Good Food Website:
Ingredients:
225g unsalted butter , softened
150g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 egg yolks , beaten
250g plain flour
110g ground almonds
raspberry (or apricot) jam, for spreading
icing sugar , to dust
Method:
1.Beat the butter and caster sugar together until pale and fluffy. Add the vanilla and egg yolks and mix thoroughly. Gradually add the flour and ground almonds. Lightly knead the mixture until it comes together in a ball. Wrap and chill for 1 hour.
2.Heat the oven to 170C/fan 150C/gas 5. Roll the dough out to the thickness of a £1 coin on a lightly floured surface and stamp out biscuits using a 6-7cm cutter. Reshape leftover dough into a ball, re-roll and cut out more biscuits. Stamp out a smaller circle from the middles of half the biscuits.
3.Put the biscuits on lined baking sheets and bake for 12-15 minutes or until golden. You may need to do these in batches. Rest for a minute then transfer to a cooling rack. When completely cold, spread the whole biscuits with either jam. Dust the ring-shaped biscuits with icing sugar. Put a sugar-dusted ring on top of a jam-covered biscuit and press lightly together.
Unfortunately (as so happens when you're trying to cook whilst also look after a 6 month old!), I made a mistake and didn't cut out enough stars, so I was left with more of the full circles than I needed. I decided to stick two of them together with jam anyway and I dusted them with icing sugar using a plastic template. So they worked out ok for a mistake!
I also had lots of left over little stars from the cut outs, so I put a dob of jam on them as well as some dusted icing sugar. You could always just roll the uncooked stars up and make more biscuits but I liked the idea of having some different shapes.
Merry Christmas Everyone, make sure you indulge!
