Day of the Dead vanilla paste and ginger biscuits

Any excuse to try and play with cookie cutters and stamps and I am there! I bought the fabulous Fred Sweet Spirits set and I love the biscuits they produce. I next want to try them with sugar paste on a cake. I think they would look lovely.

Lots of happy skulls on the tray ready for the oven.

The finished cookies ready to enjoy with a cup of tea. You can see they are rather pale but they taste brilliant. This recipe is also brilliant for making biscuits to ice.

Basic vanilla biscuits recipe
Ingredients

– 200g unsalted butter
– 200g caster sugar
– 1 medium egg
– 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
– 400g plain flour

For this recipe I didn’t use the vanilla extract but I used
– 1 teaspoon of Nielsen Massey vanilla paste
– half a teaspoon of ground ginger

Method

– Cream the butter and sugar together.
– Mix in the egg, vanilla and ginger.
– Sieve in the flour and combine into a a dough. Once the dough has pulled together wrap it in cling film and pop it in for 30 minutes.
– Roll out the dough to just shy of a 1cm thickness.
– Cut out the shapes you want and pop the pieces on a greaseproof paper lined baking tray.
– Pop the dough back into the fridge for 30 minutes.
– Preheat the oven to 180 degrees/160 degrees fan oven.
– Pop the biscuits in the oven for 8-10 minutes until the dough is firm to the touch and just starting to go light brown.
You don’t want them going golden brown or they will dry too hard. You can see how pale the finished biscuits are above.
– Leave to cool on a cooling rack and once cold store in an air tight container.

Happy Baking x

I love the look of the stamp in the dough.

I used the decorate stamp on the dough first and then use the cutter side to make the shape.