I got the recipe for lemon butter biscuits off Jamie Oliver’s website. I took his advice and decided to make them a bit more festive by replacing the lemons with oranges and adding cinnamon.
You need:
125g of butter
100g of caster sugar
1 egg
200g of plain flour
The juice and zest of two lemons (or one orange)
¼ teaspoon of baking powder
A pinch of sea salt
Plain flour, for dusting afterwards
3 tablespoons of demerara sugar
And cinnamon if you’ve making orange biscuits
And I actually managed to put all the ingredients in this time!
Put the butter and the sugar in a bowl and use an electric mixer to whoosh it all up until it’s creamy. I’ve never used the electric whisk before and it was terrifying. It should come with heavy-duty earmuffs and an arm rest - I’m actually so lazy I got tired using a machine. Beat in the egg until the mixture is fluffy and light. Then add the flour, the lemon or orange juice and zest, baking powder and salt and mix it in until your poor arm aches. At this point you’re meant to have a ball of dough but mine was a bit like very thick cake mix. It already wasn’t looking good. I started having terrible cheesecake flashbacks but managed to cover the dough and stick it in the fridge for two hours.
My ‘dough’ came out of the fridge quite firm. That tiny seed of hope nestled at the very bottom of my heart blossomed. Until I tried to get the sloppy goop I was planning to bake out of the bowl. My hands were covered in the stuff. You could plaster walls with it. I dunked half a bag of flour down on the surface and coated my rolling pin (new today!) in it. I managed to form a large ball from the dough and things seemed to be looking up. Until I rolled it out. It stuck, fast. Rather than denting the work top and then my skull with my rolling pin I persevered, cutting some lovely biscuit shapes out. With a tumbler. Trying to tug the glass up sounded like pulling your leg, minus one expensive welly, out of a marsh. My uncooked biscuits were not to be moved. In the end I scooped the whole lot up and shoved it on a greased baking tray. I used a cake slice to smooth it out to the required ½cm and sprinkled on the demerara and cinnamon (no cinnamon if you’re doing lemon biscuits) and stuck it in the oven at 180°. If you managed not to bugger the whole thing up like I did you can take your lovely biscuits out after 10 to 12 minutes. I checked on my giant sugary thing after ten minutes and realised it would probably take around double that time as the middle had grown to about two inches thick. I broke a nice brown bit off the edge for an early taste test and it wasn’t that bad. Twenty five minutes later it was still cooking. After ten minutes more I took The Blob out of the oven and shoved it on a rack to cool.
While the whole thing looked like a gingerbread man had been sick it actually tasted okay. Not brilliant, Jamie Oliver would have been very disappointed in me, but edible. When I started cooking I thought I’d take the result in to the office and get everyone’s verdict but I think I’ll wait until I manage to make something that actually looks like food.
I am quite disappointed I couldn’t even make biscuits – something any self respecting six-year-old has mastered. I’ve managed to make a mess of everything I’ve made so far but I am going to keep trying. Cooking is really quite fun if I ignore the massive tantrums I’ve thrown when things go wrong.
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