Vanilla shortbread dough
Use this dough as the base for biscuits, to eat yourself, or to make as a Christmas gift
Lemon star biscuits
- Preparation and cooking time
- Cook:
- Plus chilling time
- Easy
- Makes 16-18 biscuits
Skip to ingredients
- 1 quantity vanillashortbread dough (see below), with the finely grated zest of 1 lemon added to the flour
To decorate
- 1 tbsp lightly beaten eggwhite
- 1 tbsp lemonjuice
- 200g icing sugar
- 100g tropical dried fruits, such as mangopineapple and papaya, chopped
- 50g dried cranberrychopped
- small handful silver ball
- ribbonfor hanging on the tree
Nutrition: per biscuit
- kcal279
- fat11g
- saturates7g
- carbs44g
- sugars22g
- fibre1g
- protein3g
- salt0.26glow
Method
step 1
Preheat the oven to 180C/ gas 4/fan 160C and grease 2 large baking sheets. Roll out the dough to a thickness of about 5mm/¼in and cut out star biscuits using a 10cm cutter. Re-roll the trimmings make more biscuits.
step 2
With a skewer, make a small hole 1cm/½in from a point on each star - this is for hanging the biscuits. Bake for 18-20 minutes until turning pale golden around the edges, then transfer to a wire rack to cool. (If the holes have filled in during baking, re-make them with the skewer while the biscuits are still hot.)
step 3
Put the egg white and lemon juice in a bowl and beat in the icing sugar to make a smooth icing. Using a small palette knife, spread it generously over the biscuits to about 5mm/¼in from the edges.
step 4
Mix the fruits, then scatter them in the middle of the icing with some silver balls. Leave for at least 2 hours to set. Thread with ribbon just before you hang them and eat within 24 hours. They will keep fresh for up to 1 week stored in an airtight tin.
