Decorated shortbread biscuits

I found just adorable gingerbread moulds from the grocery store but we already had plenty of gingerbread that S had made. So, I decided to try making shortbread biscuits instead. I have been looking for a good simple recipe for biscuits that keep their form without spreading in the oven and now I have found it! The original is in Finnish here. Here is my translation:

The shortbread recipe

• 200 g (lactose free) butter
• 1 dl sugar
• 1 egg
• 3,5 dl flour
• 1,5 dl potato starch
• 1 tsp vanilla sugar

Let the butter warm up a bit to something close to room temperature. Mix the flour, the potato starch and the vanilla sugar in a bowl. Whip the sugar and butter together in another bowl. Add the egg while constantly whipping the mixture. Add the dry ingredients gradually and mix thoroughly. Put the mixture to cool down in the fridge.

Roll the dough until it’s 2 to 3 mm thin and cut pieces out with a gingerbread mould.

Bake in 200 degrees Celsius (400 degrees F) for about 5 minutes depending on your oven. The shortbread biscuits should not turn brown but keep their pale colour.

Decorating the biscuits

Make a batch of royal icing. You can find the recipe here. I divided my icing into three parts before dyeing two of the batches. Then I transferred the icings into three plastic freezer bags. I did not have enough of those metal (or plastic) tips so I decided that cutting away a corner out of a plastic bag would do. Btw. it’s easy to spoon the icing into the bags if you put the bag into a large glass and turn the edge of the bag over the glass edges.

Then the fun started. I had made the coloured icings slightly runnier by adding a bit of lemon juice and water and I used those for larger areas. I have not used this kind of icing a lot so there was a lot of experimenting involved!

A wooden cocktail sticks are good tools if you need to manipulate the icing. The same sticks were also very handy for picking sprinkles and placing them on the icing. A little touch of icing made the tip of a cocktail stick sticky enough to pick up a single sprinkle. Still the sprinkle left the stick after I had placed it onto even stickier icing.

This way I made a lot of different snowflakes:

And snowmen:

My favourite thing to decorate were these cute little ponies. They are not as Christmassy as the other shortbread biscuits I made but who cares!

I have been trying to save these for Christmas but haven’t resisted tasting some of the less successful ones! I will definitely save this recipe and use it again!

Thank you for reading! In case you are wondering, I will go back to writing about sewing after Christmas. In fact, I just finished a nice dress for S but I haven’t had time to take any photos of it, yet.

Merry Christmas for all of you!

Katja