Christmas Cooking - Christmas biscuits

If your children are anything like mine getting into a mess in the kitchen is a great way to keep them busy. Cooking is a great tool for incidental learning; you are making use of maths skills with the measuring, using literacy skills - reading and following the instructions and the mixing, rolling, cutting and icing are great to help develop motor skills.

Today I've promised the children that we'll make Christmas biscuits this afternoon. If you want to join us making Christmas Biscuits, you will need:

Equipment:

• scales
• mixing bowl
• fork
• plate
• teaspoon
• biscuit cutters (you can get some lovely ones from PinkFairyCake)
• rolling pin
• baking tray
• oven gloves,
• wire tray

Ingredients

• 175g/6oz plain flour
• 50g/2oz caster sugar
• 100g/4oz butter
• 5ml/1tsp vanilla essence
• Icing / sprinkles to decorate

Method

1. Heat the oven to 170˚C/325˚F/Gas Mark 3.
2. Grease the baking sheet with butter or margarine.
3. Weigh the flour and sugar and put them into a bowl.
4. Weigh the butter and cut into small pieces.
5. Add the butter to the flour and sugar.
   Mix together with a fork and rub everything together with your fingers.
   Rub the mixture together until it looks like fine breadcrumbs.
6. Measure the vanilla essence and add it to the mixture.
7. Gather all the mixture together and squeezing it gently to make a ball
8. Sprinkle flour on to a clean work surface and put your mixture on to it.
9. Knead it with your fingers until you have a smooth, firm ball.
10. Put some flour on the rolling pin and gently roll out the mixture until it is about half a centimetre thick.
11. Then cut out your shapes using your cutters (f you want to make tree decorations from your bicuits use a skewer to make a hole for your ribbon).
12. Gather up any spare bits of mixture and roll it out again to make more biscuits.
13. Carefully pick up the biscuits and put them on to greased baking sheets.
14. Put the baking trays into the oven and bake for about 20 minutes until the biscuits are a light golden colour.
15. Leave the biscuits to cool for 5 minutes before lifting them on to the wire cooling tray. (If you are making decorations poke the skewer into the holes to make sure they don’t close up as the biscuits cool).
16. Use icing / sprinkles to decorate if you want to.
17. Eat! (or give away as presents)