Lemony jammie deliciousness

This week is all about lemony deliciousness with the Lemon Jammies biscuits from the Baking Bible. I missed these a few weeks ago when the Alpha Bakers tested them out but I was really keen to make them since I love lemony flavours. So it was lucky that a catch up week turned up while I still had all the lemons I bought but didn't get to use. 

And I wasn't disappointed. These biscuits are plain butter biscuits flavoured with lemon zest and stuck together with lemon curd. I can't stress how delicious these are - I loved them and so did my testers. I'll definitely be making these again. I wasn't even put off by the fiddlyness of cutting out and sticking together.

The recipe starts with two tablespoons of lemon zest - that took a whole lot of lemons.

There was a heavenly scent when I opened the food processor after whizzing the sugar and lemon zest together. The recipe is simple to make in the processor, you just add the butter to the sugar/zest mixture then pulse in the flour.

The dough straight out of the food processor is crumbly but is easily pressed together through the plastic wrap. This dough is up in the top ten for tasty raw doughs.

It really is good to divide the dough into smaller amounts and to roll it out slightly before you rest it in the fridge. That way the dough pieces are in the right shape for rolling later and you can control the temperature of the dough once you start rolling and cutting. Thanks Rose and my fellow Alpha Bakers for these tips.

I used a recipe for lemon curd from Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion. Her recipes are very reliable and always delicious. The lemon curd was no exception. It looks orange in the photo although it was really a deep yellow - the egg yolks were very deep orange.

It's very satisfying to line the biscuits up neatly and it helps to check my rather cavalier shape cutting system. I was pretty happy that we're in the dry season now so the humidity is much lower. This makes the dough easier to deal with and the cook a lot happier, so biscuit making is much calmer all round. 

I used my Christmas biscuit cutter which has a removable middle cutter, so centring the round was not a problem. Happy days.

The advantage of making these after my fellow Alpha Bakers is that I can learn by their experiences. I decided to use a plain cut out for the middle which meant that there was minimal effort in lining up the biscuit shapes when sticking them together.

Some of them turned out slightly oval :) but it wasn't too noticeable and frankly lemon curd cures all ills, including slightly skew-whiff biscuit shapes.

Next week we're making Chocolate Oriolos.  mmmmmm chocolate...

The Day of the Ischler

The name does bring to mind a sci fi film rather than biscuits. But there's nothing Triffid-like about these, and my cooking experience was apocalypse free (thankfully, after last weeks' confidence-sapping episode).

I was pleasantly surprised by how successful these biscuits were. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it's hot and humid here? (haha) I've been making Christmas biscuits for colleagues, friends and neighbours for quite a number of years. Every year I spend a happy time planning my biscuit choices and anticipating the pleasure of gift-giving, primarily choosing European-style traditional Christmas biscuits. And then every year I curse and sweat late into week nights struggling with butter laden doughs which come out of the fridge too hard to work and about 30 seconds into rolling them out, are too sticky. Sometimes the results can be less than ideal, particularly when I'm trying something new.

The Ischler came at just the right time in the Alpha Baker's schedule* for my Christmas biscuit campaign but had potential for the same sticky dough challenges. And when I made the dough, which includes butter, almonds, icing sugar and a little egg, it turned out very wet. I probably should have been a bit more careful with the amount of egg I put in (no, I couldn't be bothered weighing it). It was so wet and different from the description in the recipe, that I added a little extra flour.  It was still quite moist but I didn't want to change the proportions of ingredients too much. I packaged it up anyway and put it hopefully in the fridge.

I made these biscuits over several nights. The apricot lekvar was a simple process of soaking and cooking dried apricots, and produced a lovely dense paste.

 

When I took out the first package of dough a couple of days later I was ready to wrestle with sticky dough and spreading biscuits.  However miraculously (a Christmas miracle!?) I was able to roll the dough out quite thinly and get the cut out shapes onto the trays without tears (that's the crying kind).  I made some in a star shape for a bit of Christmas jollity.

I think the relative success with this biscuit dough is due to: the small packets of dough recommended by Rose (so the others can stay in the fridge until needed); the use of gladwrap to roll out the dough; and apparently (according to PastryGirl) the egg Rose puts in gives it more elasticity so it's easier to work with. Having suffered badly from biscuits spreading in the oven the previous year, I also made sure I put the trays back in the fridge while they were waiting their turn for the oven.

I have to say I was a bit shocked by Rose's suggestion that using up the dough scraps was optional. I had to read it twice. As I was munching on some of said scraps.

I needed to package some biscuits up for a colleague who was going on holidays early (Christmas time is our long summer holiday period here) so I whipped up the ganache (burning the chocolate slightly in my haste) and put them together with the apricot lekvar. They looked great despite my slapdash ways. The recipient thought they were delicious and asked for the recipe.

The other biscuit in the picture above is a favourite of mine with spiced fruit and almonds called Alfajores from Movida Rustica. I'm just about to bake another of my favourites - Rugelach from Rose's Christmas Cookies.

*Marie once more proves her omniscience