I am finally beginning to feel a little festive now- we have decorated our christmas tree, the fairy lights are up and my ipod is loaded with cheesy christmas music- brilliant! As usual, I like to bake a range of goodies in theme with the season, and so I started with some iced vanilla biscuits. You see, my mum bought me a new set of cookie cutters from Ikea and I just couldn't wait to use them!

I was a little worried that some of the biscuit shapes wouldn't hold up in the oven-particularly the reindeer (!) but luckily my dough didn't let me down and they came out perfectly. Once baked and cooled, I just had to ice them-always a little tricky but once you get going it does seem to get easier!

I packaged the biscuits up in threes, putting the elves, boots and snowflakes together, and the santas, sleighs and reindeer together- what do you think?

Something else that I always tend to make at christmas time are florentines. These are delicious crisp-on-the-outside, chewy-in-the-middle biscuits made with nuts, glace cherries and dried fruit, then half coated in chocolate. I think that they make a lovely gift if wrapped up nicely with some pretty ribbon, and they tend to last quite a while so you can make them in advance!

My next job is to decorate our christmas cake I made a few weeks ago, but I'm still trying to come up with ideas. If you have any suggestions, please do let me know!

Yes, once again I have been making iced biscuits (I really am getting into this). The actual reason for making them this time was because me and my mum were having a freezer 'sort out' and I just so happened to come across some left over biscuit dough, which I decided I ought to bake off.

I seem to have a variety of random plastic biscuits cutters from childhood (I think they may have once been used for playdough!) and I found some cute farmyard animal shaped ones which I decided to use this time around.

Instead of decorating the biscuits in royal icing as I have done in the past, this time I decided to experiment with roll-out icing. This was actually a lot easier than using the run-out technique as the icing could be rolled and cut into the appropriate shapes using the biscuit cutters. The fiddly part was making the animals' features- especially the hair on the horses!
I somehow managed to spend a whole afternoon decorating these biscuits but hey, they look good right?

Last month I decided to have a go at practicing my piping technique by making some iced biscuits for mothers day. I admire the beautiful iced biscuits other people create but I have always thought to myself, surely they are just too much hastle to make? I find that making royal icing can be quite a pain, let alone having to colour it and use various piping bags and tubes to create the desired design. Nevertheless, the biscuits that I have seen on other peoples' blogs do look lovely and I really wanted to atleast try and have a go myself. I dug out some spring themed cookie cutters that I bought last year and got started on making some simple butter biscuits- a Nigella recipe that she claims are biscuits that have a buttery taste and hold their shape during baking. I made butterfly and flower shapes- pretty and feminine- perfect for any mother!

Luckily I had some royal icing already made up so all I had to do was make a few different colours and get piping! Once I got started, I was pleasantly suprised at how addictive icing biscuits actually is. I found myself getting quite carried away and before I knew it, several hours had passed! I am really happy with the finished biscuits, and I'm so glad a had a go. Infact, I think I'm on a bit of a roll, as I even decided to make some Easter themed ones. Do you like?