Christmas biscuits

Christmas biscuits from my German days

Making biscuits is a very good way to entertain children, keep you warm in winter, and make you relax when you need to get away from mundane problems.

I have been making biscuits for over 40 years so I got all the recipes in my head and seldom I have to check my old notes, but just in case I thought I should put my recipes here for my friends to be able to refer to them when they also feel the excitement of going into the kitchen and make some biscuits.

Basic biscuit dough.

250 g. self raising flour

125 g. sugar

125 g. butter

1 egg.

Vanilla sugar – one table spoon or an envelope of commercial bought vanilla sugar.(they usually have 8 g.) or use vanilla extract if you like.

How to make the dough:

Make the dough using your hand to mix the flour, sugar, vanilla sugar  and butter until it resembles crumbs, add the egg and continue until the dough is good enough to roll, as the sizes of eggs varies use your judgment to add more flower if needed.

Roll out the pastry thin and cut it using biscuits cutter.

Bake it in a hot oven (190 C fan assisted oven) for just 10 minutes.

Practical notes from past experience

Basically the amount of flour you use, you add half the amount of sugar, also half butter and 1 eggs per each 250 g. of flour used.

For making the very pretty Christmas stars, heart pyramids I mix the flour with hazel nuts, so if I am making 500 g. of flour recipe I would make a mixture of 300 or 350 g. of flour and the rest of ground hazel nuts. I only use this mixture for the stars and hearts, for all other biscuits I use the basic recipe.

I have in the past done it using whole meal flour when I did not have hazel nuts instead of the hazel nuts, the flavour is not the same but the texture is perfect and the result is good.

To stick together the pyramid of biscuits I use jam, best to use a jelly type without lumps as it spread better when gluing the biscuits together.

Once done sprinkle the biscuits with icing sugar for decoration.

When using the plain basic recipe I often use the cutters that are fun like a snow man, Christmas tree, moon etc. I like lemon icing to decorate these types of biscuits.

For lemon icing this is what I do:

Using icing sugar add slowly fresh lemon juice to make a consistency that can be spread on to the biscuits, I never measured the amounts, I just do it by eye, I do small quantities so nothing goes to waste and if I need more I simply add more sugar and more lemon to the dish.

For the snow man I paint the eyes, mouth and buttons of his clothes with melted chocolate just use the tip of a knife or a tooth stick, it is fun and simple.

For Christmas trees I often use hundreds and thousands sprinkled over the lemon icing, it looks colorful and children love them.

If you want to make the biscuits that have an open star, heart, circle etc. in the middle and that is place on top of a plain one glued with jam it is best to use the German cutters that have two sets one plain and the other with a hole in the middle, try to get it, it makes life so much simple and the result is always perfect, I have never seen those cutters in the British shops but now a days the internet is a good source for such special things.

With this biscuits you sprinkle the icing sugar only on the top biscuit before you glue it to the bottom with the jam.

In December 2017 I managed to get some extra biscuit cutters in Liddle the German supermarket so I got two spare to give away.

January 2022 - Since my past post I have managed to find the biscuit cutters in Aldi as well and have given away quite a few but they seem to be on sale only during the Christmas season.