Okay maybe not totally but most of it. Today i stayed in with my sick little ones well, one of them at least and the other one got to stay home because she is just too little to go climbing with Daddy, brother and sisters. Which went down REALLY well let me tell you *cough*
So in an effort to make her feel a bit better we did some baking. My girls all love to bake and while her wee pox’d sister slept..for 3 hours..we made a bit of an experiment recipe of chocolate shortbread biscuits and i thought i would share it here…
So for this you will need:
50g caster sugar
225g plain flour
140g butter (but lets face it i used stork type thing, can anyone afford butter these days!)
some bars of chocolate. I used a small bar of plain and a small bar of white..it was all i had and it was a little too much so you could use less but then there is no bowl to lick out!!
so first things first… a pinny and a big smiley face ( i have no idea why she has a paint brush!)
measure out the flour and sieve into a bowl.
i have found, through bitter and messy experience the best way to get a toddler to sieve anything is to tell them to stir it..put the spoon against the sieve and press the flour through, the shaky shaky method is never a winner.
and you can add your own hand print to the flour as well…yum :-/
Then cube the butter or butter type substitute up and add to the flour
then add the caster sugar as well.
then its time to get your fingers dirty and work it into breadcrumbs. My daughter wasn’t as interested in this bit and if she had her way the biscuits would have had great 25g lumps of butter in them. But we got there in the end!!
and this is a bit what it should look like…
then work it further into and it should start coming together into a ball, now you can do this in a mixer but there’s not a whole lot of fun in that, getting the butter between your fingers is all together more satisfying!!
then get a baking tray and sprinkle some flour on it..
then roll the shortbread out to about 1/4 inch thickness..or if your kids are doing it and they won’t let you interfere at all then whatever it gets to. Just try not to have table showing through, then its probably too thin!
some of our slightly squiffy circles, this is when us control freaks need to step back and just let the kids do whatever they want. My daughter chose two heart shape cutters, a circle and a pudsey bear.
then the biscuits go in the oven at 180degrees for about 10 minutes, if you have ones of different thickness you will have to watch as they will cook at different times. Anyway 10 minutes, then check and remove them before they go brown. They sort of just looks shiny and baked.
While they are cooking, get on with melting the chocolate
seems like she is enjoying a wee power nap?
the hob wasn’t on i should point out she was just breaking up the chocolate squares…maybe a little too carefully!!
Once it has melted, take off the heat and when the biscuits are out and a bit cool. Remember to leave them on the baking tray for a bit as they carry on cooking a little. Then you can spread it on to the biscuits, we used the back of the spoon.
the finished collection.
chocolate at the ready!
then its just a case of popping them in the fridge for a bit to cool and set the chocolate.
Nothing to it, easy peasy and if you have a little toddler around you then its something very easy to let them have a go themselves without stacks of grown up intervention.
They tasted great. We haven’t eaten pudsey yet!!
