My Go-To Biscuit Dough (and Flooding Technique)

Hello Everyone!

This week's blog post is the third in my series of "Go-To" posts and it's for my go-to biscuit dough. I use this recipe whenever I'm making what I like to call decorative biscuits i.e I'm going to be flooding biscuits. This is a really nice recipe and depending on your cookie cutter size, it makes about 25 biscuits. The dough also doesn't spread a lot in the oven so the biscuits don't lose their shape, which I know is a very important factor when making intricately shaped biscuits. 

So let's get started...

First up you'll need some ingredients:

• 115g butter
• 85g caster sugar
• 1 egg yolk
• 200g plain flour

Equipment-wise you'll need:

• Weighing scales
• KitchenAid or other mixer
• Spoon
• Lined baking tray
• Rolling pin
• Cookie cutter of your choice

I chose a heart cutter that was about 2inches in size.

1.  The first step is to preheat your oven to 200degrees/gas mark 6 and beat the butter and sugar together until it is light and fluffy.

2. Next you can add the egg yolk and the flour and beat again until the mixture resembles a dough. When you're finished mixing you should easily be able to scoop the mixture up to form a dough.

3. Sprinkle some flour on your work-surface where you'll be kneading and rolling the dough. Alternatively I like to get a square of greaseproof paper and knead and roll on this instead of directly on the table. There are two reasons for this; you don't need to add extra flour to the dough and there's no mess to clean up because you can just discard the paper. Normally I will also use the same sheet of greaseproof paper on my tray so the biscuits don't get stuck. 

4. I don't knead the dough too much as I just want it to come together into a ball so I can easily roll it out. The thickness of the tip of my pinky finger is generally the thickness I use for my biscuits. 

5. Once you have your dough rolled out you can begin cutting out the shape/s that you've chosen and put them onto your tray.

As I said the dough doesn't spread that much so the biscuits can go pretty close together.

6. These will then go into the oven for 10-14minutes depending on how thick you've made them. When the bottom of the biscuits starts to turn golden I take them out.

With the cookie cutter I used for this recipe I made 22 biscuits.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 5

The baked biscuits

Here's how thick my biscuits were

And you've made your biscuits!
However you may want to decorate these biscuits. Even though I personally think theses biscuits are good enough to eat plain, I always like to add some icing. To do this I used the flooding technique.

For this you will need:

• 200g icing sugar
• 2tbsp water
• food colouring of your choice
• some cooled boiled water
• a bowl
•  hand-mixer or spoon
• piping bags
• cocktail stick

This icing is quite quick and easy to make but the actual decorating is what takes the most time.

1. To begin, pour the icing sugar and one tablespoon of water into a bowl and mix. If your icing isn't coming together you can add the second tablespoon. 

 2. You want to mix this until the icing is smooth but quite thick as this will create the 'border' around your biscuits. The icing should not fall off the spoon if you hold it upside down.

Here's what the icing should look like

3. When your icing is mixed you can add a drop of food colouring and mix again.
For the food colouring I used 'ProGel' in the shade Strawberry.

4. Now take your piping bag and either cut a tiny hole at the bottom or fit it with a number 5 tip.

5. You can now fill your piping bag with about 2 tablespoons of the icing and start piping around the edges of your biscuits.

6. When you have finished piping borders on all the biscuits you can squeeze any excess icing back into the bowl and a add a teaspoon of the cooled boiled water. Mix this together until your icing is a runny consistency. To tell if it's done, let some icing drop off the spoon and it should disappear back into itself by the count of 10.

The flooding icing is a more wet icing

7. Once you have the right consistency for flooding your biscuits, take the piping bag and cut a hole about half the width of a pencil.

8. With the flooding icing in the bag, you can begin filling in the remainder of the biscuit. To help the icing spread you can give it a couple of taps on the table or use a cocktail stick to coax it to meet the border. If you have any air bubbles you can pop them with the cocktail stick as well.

And here's what the finished biscuits look like:

I hope you enjoy making (and eating) these biscuits as much as I do :) Thanks for reading and I'll be back next week!