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Saturday 10 November 2018

Time for.....tea and biscuits....pretty biscuit recipes

Hello there,

Hope you're having a tea-riffic day wherever you are in the world!

Here at Tea With Me and Friends towers we've been baking biscuits. There is something about the colder days that sees me heading into the kitchen to whip up something sweet and scrummy! If you've stopped by our Facebook page recently you'll have seen what we've been up to, baking biscuits that taste scrummy and look really pretty too!

I've enjoyed my baking so much that I thought I would share one of the recipes that we've been working on. Inspired by one of my favourite retro puddings, I've been creating some black forest gateau biscuits combining scrummy chocolate and cherry flavours. I've had the pleasure of enjoying real black forest gateau in the Black Forest in Germany (its far from the frozen version of my childhood) and you can't beat the flavours!


The best thing about these scrummy biscuits is that they are really simple to make. The base is a light chocolate biscuit, topped with a layer of cherry preserve and decorated with a cherry flavoured butter cream. 

To make six biscuits you will need.....
125g softened butter
75g icing sugar
115g plain flour
40g cocoa powder

Your oven needs to be preheated to 160 degrees.


To make the biscuits, first beat the butter and icing sugar together until light and fluffy (using a large bowl helps with icing sugar spills). Then sift in the flour and cocoa powder and combine to make a dough. If you find the dough a bit sticky, add a little more flour.

Next roll our your dough out and cut out your desired shapes. I went for scalloped circles - each biscuit has a base and a top, the top has a small centre cut out to reveal the pink butter cream.

Your biscuits need to be baked in the preheated oven for approximately 15 minutes (during this time you kitchen will smell amazing!).


Once baked, transfer to a cooling rack and leave until cold before decorating......then you can get creative! I decided I wanted to combine preserve and flavoured butter cream to really add cherry flavour to the chocolate biscuits. 

On the base biscuit I first spread a thin layer of the cherry preserve across the whole biscuit (be careful doing this as the biscuit can be a little fragile), then I piped cherry flavoured butter cream on top - again cover the whole of the biscuit.


Next I added the top biscuit with the centre missing, adding some red and white sparkles to the centre for a little extra sparkle. Finally pipe some more buttercream around the top biscuit. 

I'm really pleased with how these biscuits turned out - a scrummy light chocolate base, topped with lashings of cherriness! Perfect with a good cup of tea on a cold afternoon!


Over the last couple of weeks I've also experimented with other flavours too, combining other fruit flavours with chocolate biscuits.

I've baked chocolate and orange fingers and chocolate and raspberry stars....


The stars were my favourites...the dark chocolate and tangy raspberry were a perfect match. They were so good that they vanished very quickly....in fact the photo above is the only one I have of the stars! 

I hope you've enjoyed this post - if you make the biscuits yourself we'd love to see the results!

Thank you for popping by today,
Rachel

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