We’ve got a focus group at work tomorrow, asking a group of teachers about how they use our product and what could be improved. Tradition is to serve tea and biscuits at these things, and I’ve been commissioned to provide the biscuits!

Our new logo is a blue V. Not the best colour for biscuits that, so I’ve decided to do an iced biscuit and make the icing blue. The V itself is not a plain V (or I’d just use my alphabet cutters for it) so I’ve made my own template for it from some cardboard. I did try making my own cutter from a cut up drinks can, but the thin metal was hard to shape, and sticking the thing together didn’t really work. So a template I’ll cut around is the plan.

The recipe is an amalgam from various sources for a basic vanilla icing biscuit:

• 200g unsalted buttr
• 200g caster sugar (golden, as that’s all I had)
• 400g plain flour (wholemeal, as that’s all I had)
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking powder

Butter gets creamed into sugar, mix in egg, add in dry ingredients, bring into dough. Turns out using golden caster and wholemeal flour makes it much darker than I’d expected it! Of course I’m icing them, so it shouldn’t matter.

This then gets chilled in the fridge for 30mins. Then it gets rolled out and it’s time for my template.

I cut around it with a normal table knife. It was OK to start with, but as the dough heated up things got much stickier and harder. The first half I had to re-roll and that was a mess, so I made sure to get the second half done in a single roll.

Then with the off-cuts I re-rolled and cut our some Pac-Man, Ghosts & Totoros ^^

In the oven at 160c fan for 9 minutes. And… oh dear. They’ve spread all over the place! Soph reckons this is the baking powder doing this. Something I need to look into.

Pac-Man isn’t going to fit one of those ghosts into his mouth!

For icing I’m making a royal icing, so it sets properly for transporting them to work:

• 500g icing sugar
• 150ml warm water
• 1tbsp lemon juice
• 13g pasteurised, egg white powder
• blue food colouring

That lot all got whisked in the mixer on highest setting until it started making soft peaks.

The recipe said it made enough for ‘at least 24 biscuits’ — but I hardly used any in doing thick coats for over 30 biscuits! Maybe I was meant to make different colours…?

Also I had a hard time making the blue any darker than this. I kept adding more and more… but the only thing getting a darker colour blue were my fingers!

I iced the biscuits using two teaspoons, spreading it out from a dollop in the centre with the back of the spoon.

So… not quite the right colour, and due to spreading not quite the right shape. Still… they taste good, so I’m sure they’ll go down well tomorrow!