What’s Cooking – Quick and Easy Cinnamon Biscuits

From time to time we all get cravings, sometimes we can satisfy them, sometimes we can’t. One day last week sometime around 11pm I developed a huge craving to have some fresh baked cookies. We had guests over so it wasn’t exactly sleeping time yet so we decided to bake something. Obviously we knew that this had to be a quick and easy recipe as no one wanted to start a long preparation process at that time of the night. We settled on a batch of Quick and Easy Cinnamon Biscuits. As there were four people in the kitchen including a fellow foodie blogger Iwona from Smakowite Jadlo, we had a lovely warm biscuits in no time!

So if you ever get that feeling you must have a cookie now, I would highly recommend this recipe.

Ingredients:

• 160g flour
• 120g soft butter
• 3tbs icing sugar
• 1.5tsps cinnamon

Method:

To start preheat your oven to 180C and using some baking parchment line two large baking trays.

In a large bowl mix all your dry ingredients: flour, cinnamon and sugar. Add soften, cubed cutter and combine until you have a nice smoo0th and even dough.

Now depending on the shape of your cookies you can either:

– Form small balls which you will shape into roundish biscuits with your hands.

or (my preferred way)

– Roll your mixture flat using a rolling pin and then just use a cookie cutter to achieve your desired shape.

Bake in your earlier preheated oven for about 15-20 minutes or until firm to the touch.

Remove the biscuits and place on a wire cooling rack so they are allowed to cool.

Decorate if needed or desired.

They are perfect for storing, as long as you put them into an airtight container of course.

Now remember there were four of us in the kitchen and we all wanted something just a little bit different, we just couldn’t seem to settle on just one flavour, biscuits by committee! As it is a democratic household we ended up baking four batches of biscuits in four different flavours 😉 So if cinnamon is not for you, you can try adding some grated almonds or chocolate or dry coconut (our coconut biscuits also had an orange food colouring, I am quite unsure what we were thinking at the time but I suspect that a degree of tiredness may have resulted in the wrong bowl receiving the colouring. Though witnesses were few and far between…)

In the end for what amounted to less than an hour of fun and good humour in the kitchen, delayed somewhat by the deliberations over flavours, resulted in a huge box of awesome crunchy and super tasty biscuits. Possessing a wonderful snap when you bite into them and having a texture very similar to shortbread they are now a permanent feature on our “bestest recipe list”.

What’s Cooking – Traditional Shortbread

Did you ever wonder why shortbread is so expensive? We did and we have no answer to this question. It is easy to make, the ingredients aren’t very expensive yet when you look at shortbread packets on the shelves in a store they cost a fortune… why?

Anyway, due to the fact that we really like shortbread and don’t really fancy spending so much money on them in the shop we decided to make our own… helped by the fact we found a lovely recipe for it in our Make, Bake, Cookies the Recipe Book 🙂

Ingredients list:

• 165g plain flour
• 55g caster sugar
• 115g unsalted butter’ cut into small pieces
• Pinch of salt
• Icing sugar for dusting

And that is all she wrote…

Method:

Preheat the oven to a nice cool 150C.

Line a baking sheet with some baking paper.

Place the flour, salt and sugar into a large bowl and mix together. Add the butter and rub into the dry ingredients with your fingertips. Continue to work the mixture until it forms soft dough. Do not overwork the dough or your finished biscuits will be tough.

Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface to form a 20cm circle.

Transfer it to prepared baking sheet and pinch the edges or use a fork to make small groves all around the edge.

Use a fork and stab your dough a little creating some nice pattern 😉 This allows for steam to escape and helps with the cooking process.

Then using a knife, lightly mark the dough into eight equal pieces, which will create a breaking line for the future.

Bake in the preheated oven for around 45-50 minutes or until the shortbread is firm to the touch and is just coloured.

Leave to cool on a baking sheet for a few minutes.

Sprinkle with sugar.

Cut / break into pieces and move onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Enjoy! We did!