RECIPE: Easter Egg Biscuits

With Easter upon us, there's still time to whip up a batch of pretty egg-shaped chocolate biscuits to delight the kids. If you poke a hole in some of them, you can tie them with ribbon and hang them up - perfect for an egg hunt in the garden!

Ingredients

• 90g butter
• 100g caster sugar
• 1 free range egg
• 175g plain flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 30g Green and Blacks cocoa powder
• 450g royal icing powder
• 75ml water
• Pink and purple food colouring - I used Sugarflair "pink" and "grape violet"
• 10cm egg cookie cutter
• White ribbon
• Baking paper
• 5 ziplock sandwich bags

To make the biscuits:

1) Preheat the oven to gas mark 4/180C/160C fan

2) Cream the butter and sugar together in the food processor until fluffy

3) Beat in the eggs one at a time

4) Sift in the plain flour, baking powder and cocoa powder and mix slowly

5) Remove the dough from the mixer, kneading gently and briefly

6) Place the dough on baking paper on a baking tray , cover with another layer of baking paper and then roll out  to 5mm thickness - this stops the dough sticking

7) Place the tray in the fridge, keeping the dough covered with the baking paper and chill for 30 minutes

8) Remove from the fridge, remove the top layer or baking paper and stamp out your egg shapes, removing the surplus dough from between the shapes

9) If you want to be able to hang up the cookies, use a drinking straw to cut out a hole near the top of each one

10) Bake for about 16 minutes until just firm to the touch, then cool completely before decorating

To ice the biscuits:

1) Place the water in a large bowl and add the royal icing powder, beating vigorously for 10 minutes 

2) Divide the icing into 3 bowls: add pink food colouring to one and mix well, add purple to another and leave the third white

3) Fill one zip lock bag with the pink icing and one with the purple and seal the bags. Press the icing down towards one corner of each bag and cut a tiny snip to allow the icing out - these are your make shift icing bags

4) Pipe an outline around the edge of all your cookies in either pink or purple and allow to dry

5) Squeeze the remaining pink and purple icing back into their bowls and add a drop of water to each, mixing vigorously, to create a more runny icing. Also add a few drops of water to the white icing, to make that a little more runny

6) Fill the 3 remaining ziplock bags with the 3 icing colours, and cut a little snip in each corner again, this time a little larger than before, so that a little more icing can flow out

7) Fill the centre of each cookie with the same colour icing as the outline

8) Then dot white icing over the surface - it will spread slightly and sink into the iced surface

9) Then add tiny dots of either purple or pink inside each white dot - you can use a cocktail stick to help

10) Allow to dry for a few hours or overnight and then tie each cookie with ribbon

OR.... for a quicker alternative to icing that you can do with the kids, drizzle your baked biscuits with melted chocolate! You can still create pretty pastel coloured biscuits by adding a little pink or purple food colouring to melted white chocolate before decorating with it :)