Valentine's heart-shaped Biscuits

Valentine’s Day is still a pretty big novelty for me, as this is only the second Valentine’s Day of my life on which I’ve actually been in a relationship.  Tetley and I did get together in 2009, but we started going out a week after Valentine’s Day, what terrible timing!  I’ll ask you to humour my excitement and the terrible girlyness of today’s recipe, I’ll make zombie-shaped cookies or something next time to make up for it…

For the biscuits, you will need:

·         150g butter at room temperature

·         100g caster sugar

·         2 egg yolks

·         200g plain four

·         25g cocoa powder

·         ½ tsp vanilla extract

·         300g icing sugar

·         Food colouring (I used a tiny amount of red and blue to get pastel-ish colours)

1.  First of all, beat the butter until it is smooth.  I find that putting it in the microwave for 10 seconds before doing this greatly saves my limited upper body strength.  Add the sugar and cream the butter and sugar together until they look like this:

2. Separate the egg yolks from the egg whites and mix in the yolks.  To do this, gently break the egg over a separate bowl to your main mixing bowl and tip the yolk from one half of the eggshell to the other until the white has drained into the bowl below.

3.  Sift in the flour and cocoa powder and add the vanilla extract.  Mix everything together, using your hands to squish the dough together at the final stage.  If the dough takes on the consistency of really terrible dried out playdough, add a little bit of water.

4. Wrap the dough in clingfilm and refrigerate for 20 minutes.  Use this time to finish making the card for your boyfriend if you, like me, are both very disorganised and have a boyfriend who literally will not notice anything you are doing in the same room as him if he’s playing on his Xbox.

5. Roll out the dough on a floured surface to the thickness of about 1cm.  I discovered that I have no rolling pin at this point, but being a master of improvisation I used a bottle of peach schnapps instead.  Classy!

6. Cut out heart shapes with a cookie cutter.  For non-Valentine’s themed biscuits, use a different cutter, or if you don’t have any cutters, use a sharp knife to cut your own shapes or an upside-down glass to make circles.

7. Put the biscuits onto a baking-paper lined tray and cook in a preheated oven at 160 degrees for 12 minutes.  Take out and leave to cool.

8. Mix the icing sugar with a little water and food colouring and drizzle onto the biscuits with a teaspoon.

I got this recipe from the Asda magazine and it worked very well, my only criticism is that it claimed that the given quantities would make 24 biscuits and I only ended up with 10, I feel that Asda’s biscuits must have been freakishly small.  If I was making for more than two people, I would definitely double the quantities!  I leave you with a gloriously geeky Valentine’s picture: