Saturday 23 November 2013

Swirling and twirling

I like to make an edible gift for the boys' party bags so when I stumbled across green swirl biscuits on Pinterest last week, I decided I just had to make them for Hayden's birthday party. Worth a shot at least.

The original link on Pinterest was for an American recipe. Gah!!!! But a quick google search led me to a UK recipe. And relax!

Here we go:

220g butter 

220g caster sugar

1 large egg

370g plain flour

Food dye gel

Hundreds and thousands


Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy then mix in the egg. Add the flour and mix until you have a smooth, well combined dough. It shouldn't be sticky at this stage.

Split the dough in half, colour one of the pieces with the food dye gel colour of your choice. I used my Kitchen Aid to do this so put this half of the dough back in the mixer, add the dye and beat until the colour is well mixed into the dough.

Place one piece of dough between two sheets of baking parchment. Roll out until dough is around 4mm thick and slightly smaller than an A3 piece of paper. Repeat with the other ball of dough, then chill the dough sheets for 30 minutes.


Take the dough out of the fridge, remove one side of the baking parchment then flip one piece of dough on top of another. 


Place the baking parchment on top and roll the dough a bit more to help the two layers to merge. Then starting with the long side tightly roll the dough into a long sausage. Wrap well in clingfilm. Roll the dough back and forth to get a tight cylinder and get rid of any bubbles in the dough. You’re aiming to roll a cylinder that has a diameter of around 4cm.

Unroll the clingfilm and place this and the dough in a shallow baking tray. Sprinkle a generous amount of sprinkles over the dough and roll it over to embed the sprinkles in the dough. It's best to use a baking tray as hundreds & thousands will roll everywhere otherwise. Randomly my Sainsburys didn't have hundreds and thousands only red, yellow and Christmas colour mix. I decided to go for red.


Wrap the dough back up and place it back in the fridge for another 30 minutes

Preheat the oven to 160°c (fan)/180°c then take the dough out of the fridge and cut into rounds about 4mm thick. Place on a lined baking tray.


Bake for 12-15 minutes until they are only just beginning to turn golden brown. Just be careful, due to the sugar content of the biscuit they can go from uncooked to burnt in a very short time

Once the biscuits have baked transfer to wire rack and leave to cool completely. They are still really quite soft at this stage but they harden on cooling. Some of the hundreds and thousands lost their colour a bit and the biscuits aren't as vibrant as the original American recipe (I say they've been photoshopped) but they do look quite nice in my opinion (better in real life than on the photos)





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