Anyway, you may remember that I mentioned wanting to learn to make proper iced biscuits - made famous by the company Biscuiteers, stocked in Harrods, Liberty and Fortnum & Mason and wildly expensive to buy ready made. Well, given that polar bears are white and that would mean no messing about with food colourings, I figured this cutter would give me the perfect excuse to practice. And who doesn't love polar bears?
[Now imagine if you will a period of time not unlike another ice-age. Glaciers slowly carving out new valleys. Civilisations rising and falling etc etc]
Ahem. Some hours later - and with copious amounts of royal icing now welded to our slate kitchen tiles - I had finally managed to knock up a fairly respectable batch of polar bears. Some of them may look a little more sheeplike than the mighty hunter of the frozen North technically should, but I didn't think it was bad for a first attempt. I also now have a new appreciation for why the damn things are so expensive, given how long I was wrestling with an icing bag. [The cookies themselves take no time, and you could of course just slosh some regular glacé icing on and be done in minutes]
Ta-dah!
I used Nigella's recipe for cut-out cookies, which I will reproduce here, as I believe it's all over the web anyway. I used royal icing sugar for the icing, which means you don't have to mess about beating egg whites and so on.
Polar Bear Biscuits
90g unsalted butter
100g caster sugar
1 egg (Nigella says large but I used medium and it was fine)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract.
200g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
- Cream the butter and sugar together til moussey looking (use a mixer, I do), then add the egg and vanilla extract and beat together.
- Mix the dry ingredients together in another bowl, then add to the mixture until combined.
- Squish the dough together into a fat disc, wrap in cling-film and allow to rest in the fridge for an hour.
- Roll out to about 0.5cm thick on a floured surface and cut out your polar bears.
- Arrange on baking trays lined with greaseproof. They keep their shape well - important for this kind of biscuit - so you can put them fairly close together as long as they're not touching.
- Cook in pre-heated 180c oven for around 10-12mins until they are just beginning to go golden around the edges.
- Cool on wire racks.
What have you been up to?
Lakota x
ps. Don't forget the giveaway here