Some of you may pale at the thought of this, but I often fail to finish a bottle of wine before it goes off. This troubles me because I'm wasting not only some nice wine, but also some money.
Fortunately, a collection of recipes on BBC Food has saved the day. It turns out that you can make some pretty tasty biscuits using leftover wine. I had a friend come to stay a few weeks back and she left about half a bottle of rosé wine behind; I only like red wine, so naturally there is now a plentiful supply of rosé in my kitchen. I also had about a glass of red wine left from Easter. I really tried to finish the bottle - I even brought it home to my parents' for the weekend - but alas I could not. Therefore I made half the biscuits using red wine (the purple ones), and half with rosé (the white ones). Both taste excellent, by the way.
Unable to leave a recipe alone, I have adapted the original recipe for Ciambelline Al Vino by Sophia Real. The recipe listed fennel as an ingredient, and since I'm not hugely keen on aniseed notes I switched that for cinnamon. I also added sprinkles because they make most things look better.
I actually made the sprinkles myself using this recipe from Bravetart; the piping part is rather tedious and I gave up half way through the batch. Luckily the mixture keeps well, so I can pick up where I left off on the piping front when my wrist/hand has recovered.
Makes 20
Ingredients
- 250mL Wine (I used 125mL each of red and rosé)
- 250g + 25g Caster Sugar
- 250mL Sunflower Oil
- 650g Plain Flour
- 1 Tbsp Ground Cinnamon
- Sprinkles
- In a mixing bowl, whisk the wine, 250g of the sugar and the sunflower oil together.
- Slowly add the plain flour, stirring as you go (you may want to switch from whisk to spoon), until a smooth, elastic dough has formed.
- Cover the mixing bowl and leave the dough to rest for an hour.
- Preheat the oven to 180C and line 4 baking trays with parchment paper (or just reuse the same one or two trays).
- In a wide bowl, stir together the remaining sugar, the sprinkles and the cinnamon.
- Pinch of tablespoon-sized pieces of dough and roll them into balls.
- Roll each ball in the sugar-cinnamon-sprinkle mix and place on a baking tray, leaving about 1inch/2.5cm radius between them.
- Bake in the oven for 15 minutes, then allow to cool on a wire rack. Remember the biscuits will get harder as they cool, so don't overcook them because you think they are still too soft.