Spiced biscuits Chritsmas gifts

A quick request first before we move on to the serious business of BISCUITS. Please vote to get a vegan cookery programme onto channel 4! I just got an email from my sister about this. It's a competition to get a short documentary onto channel 4 and one of the entries is a vegan cooking show. It seems to be in the lead at the moment but please vote to keep it there because it'd be a fantastic way to raise awareness of vegan cooking in the UK: http://www.4docs.org.uk/competition/view/387/The+Garden+of+Eaton You do have to sign up to vote but it's a very quick form.

Okay, now biscuits.

I wanted to make some gifts this year for my neighbours so I bought a few mugs, filled them with homemade spiced biscuits and covered the mugs with cellophane and fancy ribbons and rosettes. I struggled to find cellophane but eventually found it in our local art shop. I think they looked pretty good. Here were the biscuits that went inside. I used star cutters of different sizes to make biscuits which would stack and fit inside the mugs.

They were fun to make and wrap and very yummy. I know this because I made far too many and kept back, for personal consumption, all the ones which weren't perfectly shaped. The basic recipe is below but I made a triple batch to fill 5 mugs and still have loads left over.


Spiced Biscuits (adapted from Eva Batt's Vegan Cookery)

4 oz plain flour

4 oz oats

4 oz sugar

1 tsp mixed spice

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp baking powder

4 oz margarine

1 dsp mollases

Mix up all the dry ingredients and then rub in the marg with your hands until you get a crumbly mixture. Add the mollases and mix with a wooden spoon until you get a sticky dough.

Roll the dough out between two sheets of greaseproof paper until it's about 8mm thick. Cut out your biscuit shapes and bake them on more greaseproof paper at 190c/375F for 8 minutes. Dust while still warm with icing sugar. (Some of the sugar will melt and glaze the biscuits and some will stay white and pretty but will fall off less than if you dust them when they're cold. I wanted the icing sugar to stay fixed on these because they were going to be stacked on top of one another inside the mugs.)