Christmas means Biscuits?

I had a sudden urge to make Christmas biscuits of some form or another. I don't mean those really hard ones you hang on the tree, I mean something warming, crumbly and delicious. Probably heavy in chocolate. Below is the result, I think it turned out rather well.

You've probably worked out by now that at least 50% of my cooking is improvised. This is no different, we had wholemeal flour in so that's what got used and let me tell you, it worked. These biscuits are delicious. 

Britt's Chocolate Christmas Biscuits

You will need:

• Wholemeal flour (but like I said, that's just what I had in, plain will do fine) - 300 grams
• Caster Sugar - 150 grams
• Butter - 250 grams (that's a full block)
• Cocoa Powder - 40 grams (roughly)
• Baking Powder - 2 teaspoons

For the topping:

• Dark Chocolate - 150 grams
• Baileys - 2 tablespoons (give or take) - optional
• Cinnamon - a dash
• Icing Sugar - very little
• White Writing Icing (totally optional and difficult to control at that)

Put the oven to 180°C and line a baking tray with parchment.

Put the sugar and butter into the largest mixing bowl you can find and cream them together, then add the cocoa powder and do it again. When they're all combined rub in the flour and baking powder. The mixture will turn to crumbs, gradually gather it into a solid ball. If you find the mixture is too crumbly to stick together you can add a tablespoon or two of milk (it's unlikely you'll need much if any). If you've got one of those snazzy food processors or kitchen aids skip most of this step and dump the butter, flour, sugar and cocoa butter into the thing all at once but realise you're removing the joy from it. I could just be jealous of your kitchen gadgetry. 

Pull off a small ball at a time and squish slightly as you place them on the baking tray. I recently got some shape cutters, don't get excited, they're just circles, so I actually pushed the mixture flat (I don't have a rolling pin yet) and used the shape cutter, then repeated until I was all out of the mixture. 

You'll probably get 12 biscuits per a tray, cook them for 15 minutes. Leave them to stand for 15 minutes (you can use this time to cook the next batch as this recipe makes roughly 40 biscuits) on a cold surface or cooling rack. 

Once you've got all the biscuits you want and they're nicely cooled it's time to start on the topping. Melt the chocolate in a bowl over boiling water. Add the Baileys (optional but encouraged), cinnamon and icing sugar, I won't tell you how much, this depends entirely on your preference but use the icing sugar to get the texture slightly gloopy and spreadable rather than a runny mess. Spread the chocolate Baileys mix on to the top of the biscuits and leave to set, this can take a while depending on how boozy you went. You can also attempt to draw snowflakes with writing icing at this stage but it's not a deal breaker.

Now eat one.

Now another.

North East Chilli Fest

Today was the first day of the North East Chilli Festival at Seaton Delaval Hall. Paul and I agree that we need to visit Seaton Delaval Hall again in the near future, possibly a destination for cycling.


We operated a very strict policy at the festival to avoid buying everything and being rich in only chilli based items. We did a full tour of all of the taster bowls, upon deciding the highlights over a glass of Pimms we purchased. The photo shows our swag, the best of the best in our opinion. Having said that, there wasn't a bad chilli among them, some were simply too hot for my poor taste buds to handle. I prefer a depth of taste over heat. 

Britt and Paul Recommend...

The Chilli Pepper Company's Chilli Honey - Sweet runny honey with a warmth that grows gradually. I think this will be going on my morning crumpet, I think it would also do well with roasting carrots.

The Cherry Tree's Hot Chilli and Carrot Chutney - I'm eating this right now, with some cheese, on an oatcake. I'm also betting it'll be very nice on some good burgers.

A bit Chilli!'s Serano Smokey Chutney - A lovely smokey chutney, as the name suggests. Probably another that will go well on a burger or with sausages actually, yes sausages. Or bacon.

Holly and the Ivy's Scotch Bonnet Preserve - A little hotter than the rest, not having chunks of veg to spread the flavour, this preserve features some chilli seeds which give you some bursts of heat, still quite sweet though. Yum.

Chillilicious's Red Pepper Chilli Chutney - I know I keep saying this but it will go well on a burger. Also I think this would be great for dipping things into, like carrot sticks and celery. Oh, just dress a full salad with it and stick some lamb beside it, cooked with chillies.

Chillilicious's Chilli & Coriander Oatcakes - Remember that oatcake I was having the chilli and carrot chutney off of with cheese? Well this is that oatcake. That makes it the best oatcake I have ever had. Ever.

Fresh chillies, I forget where we got these from, but I'm sure you'll see them if you go along tomorrow. Also there are some chilli chocolates in there which we picked up from the man who does the fudge... opposite them we also picked up a "Relight My Fire" chocolate bar from a lovely stall selling very quirky chocolates.

That green thing behind all those jars, that's a chilli plant. I don't have a good track record with caring from plants but was reliably informed by Simone of mmm Newcastle that they prefer to be mostly left alone anyway. We put it in the same bag as the fresh red chillies, I like to think that will give it some aspirations, a clue as to what it's meant to be. If we get even small chillies I will be quite pleased.

On our final pass, towards closing time we noticed that Pet Lamb Patisserie had also been there earlier in the day, looks like they sold out pretty quick. I must say that if you ever get a chance to try a Pet Lamb cake you really should, hopefully they'll be there tomorrow.

So with all of these chilli products now in the house I feel inspired, I'm going to attempt to make some chilli cupcakes, or possibly chilli muffins, depending on ingredients. Paul is going to make some lamb burgers. We're off to get some lamb mince to have with all of this chilli.

If you get the chance do get yourself down to the festival tomorrow, it's on from 10am until 4pm and has wonderful Wylam Beer to keep you refreshed, a haystack for the kids to jump about on and more chilli than you can shake a stick at.

Discovering Biscuits

Recently I've been on a bit of a biscuit making kick. It started with the cookies I blogged about not so long ago and has grown from there. All this baking is like rediscovering my childhood, I was always making cupcakes, crispy cakes or pie pastry with my mum and granny. There's something very satisfying about knowing that from such simple ingredients you can make almost anything, usually in far greater quantities than you intended. Those ingredients stretch a long way.

If you care about all your biscuits being the same, uniform in shape and size, then you'll need to get one of those shape cutters, I don't even own scales, so I'm not about to start caring what shape they come out of the oven in. These are now officially Paul's favourite biscuits, the best thing about them is they can be as chocolatey as you like. I've already made a variation on this recipe involving chocolate chilli buttons and intend to make them with orange zest in the next few weeks to create a sort of chocolate orange biscuit.


Okay, so how did I make these?

You will need two sets of dough, chocolate and vanilla.

The Vanilla Dough
175g plain flour - 1 and 1/2 cups (for those of us without scales)
75g icing sugar - 2/3 a cup
125g butter - do it by eye, most packets are 250g so roughly 1/2 of that
vanilla pod seeds, or a little bit of vanilla extract

The Chocolate Dough
150g plain flour - 1 and 1/3 cups

25g cocoa powder - 1/4 a cup
125g butter - roughly 1/2 of a packet
And just to offset the bitterness of the cocoa powder (but not too much) a tablespoon or so of icing sugar, you be the judge.


Get the block of butter out of the fridge, divide in half. Cut each half into cubes, this will make it so much easier to handle later. Now go and have a cup of tea.
Preheat your oven to 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4, grease and line an oven tray with greaseproof paper or baking parchment.

By this point the butter will be soft enough for your needs. Take all your vanilla dough ingredients and put them in a bowl, then rub together until the mixture becomes a dough. Take the dough out of the bowl and put it to one side.

In the same bowl (no point in adding to the washing up) put together all of your chocolate dough ingredients and as before rub together until it becomes a dough.

Now you've got two doughs, yay. Roll each dough out into a square that's about 1cm thick (your baby finger is probably 1cm thick) and press one dough on top of the other, brush with a little water to make sure it sticks. Cut that in half and press one half on top of the other, you'll now have four layers of dough, stripy.

The striped part of the dough will be the top of your biscuit so cut it up accordingly, making each biscuit roughly bigger than the size of a domino. Place your dough on the baking tray and put them in the oven for 25 minutes. All ovens are different so keep an eye on them, you're looking for the vanilla dough to go slightly golden, the texture of the biscuits should not be too soft or they'll just fall apart but be careful you don't cook them for too long.

While they're cooking you might consider melting some dark chocolate and white chocolate to drizzle over them once they exit the oven. This is optional and I will warn you the texture of melted white chocolate is not what you expect it to be, but it will set back to normal once left to stand on the biscuits.


This tends to make enough biscuits to fill a large tin, they'll probably last you a month (less if children are involved).

This recipe is roughly based on Chocolate harlequin biscuits, having mutated through use to reflect my wants and needs.

Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Biscuits

These were delicious.

Being rather fond of chocolate it was about time that I learned how to make my own chocolate biscuits. It's safe to say that Nigella Lawson likes chocolate almost as much as I do. The recipe that I followed was Totally Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies, with a few alterations, as follows:

There was a lack of light brown sugar in the cupboard so I used dark muscovado sugar instead, this is a very rich, sticky sugar, apparently ideal for sprinkling on desserts. I did not sprinkle, I used roughly 75g.

The term chocolate chips can be interpreted loosely in my opinion, Nigella covers for this school of thought by referring to them as morsels. I snapped two bars of chocolate into squares, some large, some small and stirred them into the mix before scooping it out onto the baking tray.

Overall this recipe took me under an hour, anything that can be cooked in under an hour is worth your time.
Don't expect neat and tidy looking biscuits from this recipe. They are huge, chunky, amazingly chocolatey and great broken up with some icecream and raspberries. They are not tidy and if this worries you then you're reading the wrong blog.