A recipe for children!
My mum has inspired me with her fantastic new blog and asked me to help by writing a recipe for children. Her characters Doll Splinter and Egg O have been up to all kinds of mischief over at www.julietsdoll.com including baking biscuits for a picnic.
I have loved cooking and baking since I was a little girl. This is me baking at Christmas when I was about 8 years old. I am in my Granny’s kitchen, I used to love helping.
To write this recipe I enlisted a bit of help myself… from Skelly!
Hello Skelly!
Skelly is an old (very old) friend from back when I was a little girl. He is most helpful in the kitchen! Here he is with all the ingredients you need
125g soft butter
55g caster sugar
150g plain flour
30g fine polenta
the grated peel from a lemon
some poppy seeds for sprinkling
You will also need:
An electric mixer (or whizzer as I call it)
OR
a wooden spoon and a bowl
a rolling pin
a biscuit cutter
a baking tray lined with some greaseproof paper
.
Start by getting everything you need together on your kitchen table.
Put the butter and sugar in your whizzing machine (like my magimix in the picture below) or use a handheld whisk, or flex those muscles and use a wooden spoon, to cream the butter and sugar together. The mixture should be very soft and pale and creamy.
Next add the flour, polenta and lemon peel and mix again to combine them. 
The mixture will come together in a crumbly mix like this:
Now tip the mix into a bowl and use your hands to gently squish the mixture together into a ball. You have made biscuit dough!
Skelly REALLY enjoyed this bit.
Now put the dough in a plastic bag or wrap it in cling film and put it in the fridge for about half an hour. It will be too soft to roll out now so you must be patient.
When the half an hour is up take the dough from the fridge and put it onto a table dusted with a bit of flour. This will stop the dough from sticking to the table! Dust the top of the dough with flour too, this will stop the dough from sticking to the rolling pin!
Now gently press down the dough with the rolling pin and start to roll it out. Keep dusting with flour so nothing sticks and don’t press too hard. You want the dough to be about half a centimetre thick. You can actually make these as thick or thin as you like but this means you will have to adjust the cooking time.
Skelly wasn’t very helpful at this point and instead just rolled about on the rolling pin..
Now sprinkle poppy seeds on the top of your dough and gently press them down by lightly rolling the rolling pin over the top one last time.
Now cut out your biscuits to any shape you like! Skelly wanted bone shaped biscuits but I didn’t have the right cutter so we did circles instead.
Now lay your biscuits onto the baking tray and pop them back into the fridge for another half an hour. This makes them firm up other wise the butter which has become soft again from being rolled out, will melt too quickly in the oven and the biscuits will spread out and lose their shape.
Now is the time to turn the oven on so it can heat up.
When the biscuits have firmed up put them in your pre heated oven for 10-15 minutes. Keep checking them! You want them to be a lovely golden brown colour.
When they are ready take them out and put them on a wire rack to cool and sprinkle them with a little bit more caster sugar.
When they are cool. EAT THEM! Yum Yum.
annascafe 