Aimée's Easter Biscuits

Hi - I'm Aimée, I'm orginally from Cambridge and I moved to Nunhead with my fiancé this time last year. We have had just 1 year to discover the secrets of the lovely little corner of South London, but we are so pleased we have settled here.

I am also your resident blog editor, so I look forward to reading you recipes and posting them up here for you to share. If you have any questions or suggestions for the blog please do let me know.

Here's a little non chocolate based seasonal offering just in time for Easter, they make a lovely Esater gift packaged up in cellophane:

Somerset Easter Biscuits

This recipe is a collaborative effort between myself and my Mum. She was born in London, out this way in fact - she remembers playing in Peckham Rye Park as a child, but she moved with her parents to Somerset when she was still little. This recipe is as close as we can get to the Easter Biscuits she used to have as a child in Somerset  - it has taken some years of tweaking, but she thinks we are there now. My one concession is I like to make them fairly small, I use a 7cm crinkled round cutter, whereas Mum makes them much bigger like the ones she remembers. You could use whatever cutter you like, but traditionally they should be made with a round crinkle cutter. 

Another tradition I recently discovered was to use Cassia oil in the biscuits - perhaps next year I'll 

 give that a try!    

 

 Ingredients

 Makes about 24 x 7cm biscuits

Okay ignore the sultanas, they snuck into my shot, but aren't actually an ingredient in this recipe! 

1 egg + 1 egg yolk

100g softened butter

200g plain flour (or 150g plain + 50g rice flour for a bite of extra crunch)

75g Golden caster sugar 

half tsp Mixed spice

half tsp ground cinnamon

2 heaped tbsp mixed peel

100g Currants

A little milk and extra sugar to finish 

Method

Preheat oven to 200 degrees C or equivalent.

 

 Cream the butter and sugar till smooth and then beat in the egg and egg yolk. 

Then sift in the flour and spices and add the fruit. Mix it all till it combines to form a soft dough. 

Then turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and knead lightly to bring it all together.

Using a rolling pin roll the dough out to around 5mm thickness and use a 7cm crinkled cookie cutter to make 24 biscuits - you will have to gather up all the offcuts into a ball and roll the dough out again once or twice to use up all the dough and get all 24. 

Lay out on a prepared baking sheet (they hardly spread at all, so can be fairly close together) and bake for 5-7 minutes till the dough is cooked but still pale. 

Take them out, brush each with a little milk and sprinkle with a little sugar and then pop them back in the oven to finish off - 5 minutes or so. 

Keep an eye on them, they are ready when they are nicely golden.
Cool on a wire rack.

These are traditionally wrapped in bundles of 3 to represent the holy trinity.

Hope you enjoy them!