Love sweet love- iced heart shaped biscuits for wedding or hen do

Skill: High
Cost: Medium
Time: 45 mins (Plus setting time- overnight)
Equipment: Mixing bowl, rolling pin, cookie cutters, baking tray

Cute hen do/wedding cookies

This weekend I went home to Somerset to attend a hen do. I wanted to bring a gift and decided on some cute biscuits. My mum had given me some heart cookie cutters for Christmas and I thought this would be a great way to test them out. It was for my boyfriend's mum so I wanted them to be cute and classy, not tacky and crude!

I did some research on Pinterest and chose to use the 'icing and flooding technique'. For this I chose a simple biscuit base.

Ingredients:

For the Biscuits

350g Plain flour

100g Self raising flour

125 Caster sugar

125g Butter

1 Egg

125g Golden syrup

For the Icing

900g Icing sugar

2 eggs

2 tablespoons of lemon juice

Food colouring- I recommend the highly concentrated Wilton icing available at Lakeland

(+1 or 2 tablespoons of water to create icing suitable for flooding)

1. Sift the flour and mix in caster sugar. Then rub in butter. Once it resembles fine breadcrumbs add the egg and golden syrup and mix.

2. It should come together to look like this:

3. Roll it out to about 1cm thick and cut out the heart shapes.

 4. Place on a tray and put in the fridge for half an hour.

5. Bake in the oven at 170C/ Gas mark 3. Leave to cool.

While they are cooling make the icing. Sift the flour and add the eggs and lemon juice. Mix until stiff. Halve this mixture. Half will remain stiff and white, the other half will be used for the flooding. To create this add a small drop of the food colouring and 1 or 2 tablespoons of water.

6. Ice a white outline with royal icing. You can use a piping bag or just a sandwich bag with a small hole cut out of one corner. Allow to dry.

7. 'Flood' with pink icing. I used a teaspoon for the main part and a chopstick to drag the icing to the edges. One flooded shake or tap the biscuits to get an even finish. I watched a tutorial on YouTube to get the rough idea.

8. Use the white icing again to ice patterns/words.

9. Place back in the oven for 30 minutes on the lowest heat to dry the icing out and give a shiny finish.

 10. The result:

They were far from perfect, rough edges and bubbles in the icing, but I was quite proud for a first try!
I will definitely try these again but next time I would leave the writing to the day after the flooding.
Over all they looked good on display and the bride to be was very pleased with them!

If you have tried icing and flooding do you have any tips?
I would recommend using a pin to drag the flooding out into the corners and pop any air bubbles. 

Until next time, 

Emily x