Foody Friday: Great British (Mancunian)Halloween Bake Off!

Firstly – I apologise.. as you can see I’m running late with this post… It’s now 23:00 hours on Friday here in Manchester, so strictly speaking it’s still ‘foody Friday’ however, for many of you reading this I suspect it may be Saturday where you are! My excuse… simply that I’ve had a week full of ups and downs, laughter and tears and plenty of hugs….

Furthermore, having had my granddaughters with me all week, my house looks like a bomb has exploded and I had to do a bit more ‘cropping’ of the photo’s to cut out some of the horrific mess.. haha!

Looking after my granddaughters during half term, while mum has been in hospital, had to include a fun baking day and of course we are heading toward Halloween, so it was a perfect opportunity to hold a Halloween biscuit decorating competition, to create some Halloween feasts… Not good for my ‘diabetes healthy eating’!!! Yikes… needless to say I fell off the waggon and my granddaughters definitely won the ‘inspiration’ prize for ‘best decorated biscuits’!

Who couldn’t resist pinching some of these shortbread teddy’s and gingerbread pumpkins?

I admit it – the gingerbread pumpkins were ‘purchased’ and then expertly decorated by my granddaughters….

However, the shortbread recipe is a classic handed down from my mum and is a recipe that our family always produce as part of our Xmas Tradition. It’s perfect anytime for some baking with the kids…

Shortbread Recipe:

• 125g butter (soft – room temperature)
• 50g caster sugar
• 100g plain flour
• 50g cornflour

 

You can use cornflour or ground semolina as these add the extra ‘shortness’ to the biscuit.. I used cornflour today..

Method:

• Pre heat oven to Gas Mark 3/4 or 160 degree celsius
• Lightly grease a baking tray
• Rub together the flour, cornflour and butter to breadcrumb texture
• Add the caster sugar and lightly stir in
• Gather the mixture together to form a dough ball
• Roll out to approx. 0.5 – 1 cm thickness. (For today with the children I left it slightly thicker to avoid breakages.. If I was doing some ‘adult’ baking then I would roll out thinner for melt in mouth ‘short’ biscuits)
• Use cutters to create required shapes
• Place on baking tray and prick each biscuit several times with a fork.
• Cook in the middle of the oven for approximately 20 minutes until the biscuits look golden brown.
• Remove from the oven – leave on the baking tray to cool for a few minutes and then transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling before decorating..

Obviously we never ‘taste’ any of the toppings or mixture as we go along… NEVER – HONESTLY…. You can see that there’s definitely no chocolate round this gorgeous mouth I there!!!

Toppings today:

• Melted chocolate with a drop of peppermint essence
• White icing made with Icing sugar and a drop of water and peppermint essence
• Tubes of ready made decorating icing that comes in little tubes in various colours.. These came free with the gingerbread pumpkins…

 I love glitz (as you can probably tell from my ‘bathroom makeover’ video How to create a glitzy bathroom..) and baking is no different. We sprinkled the biscuits with some fabulous edible glitter which doesn’t come out in the photo’s but looked brilliant – very sparkly!