Peanut butter biscuits and mocha biscuits!

Today I decided to be a little crazy and make biscuits instead of cupcakes! Oh my! The Boy requested peanut butter biscuits, so naturally I had to bow to his wishes. I additionally made mocha biscuits (although I sort of forgot how strong coffee is...)


The peanut butter biscuits I made using, of course, Mary Norwak's recipe. I won't post the method on here (if you really really want it, let me know and I can send it to you) but it is quite a basic recipe; use a bog standard biscuit recipe but chuck in 100g of peanut butter (smooth or crunchy, whichever suits your fancy). I WAS going to leave them as they were but it felt WRONG not to decorate them in some way! I made the stars out of fondant using a cutter I bought in France years ago. Stupidly enough, I never thought to use it in baking; I've always used it to cut out of vegetables. Anyway! I melted some dark chocolate and spooned it onto the biscuits, then added the white stars. I'm really rather pleased with how they turned out. I think they look pretty cool and they taste quite nice too :D

Now then! Here is the recipe for my mocha biscuits. It's quite a good recipe because you don't need to use any eggs! I'm not sure how good it is for rolling out and using a biscuit cutter; you may have to pop the dough into the fridge for a few hours so it'll be firm enough to roll out.


50g sugar
100g butter
175g flour
1 tbsp cocoa powder (I probably put about 2tbsp in... oops)
1 tsp coffee (I used instant, and put about a million tbsp in, ooooops)
A dash of milk!

• Heat your oven to 150°C
• Cream the butter and sugar together
• Sift in flour, cocoa powder & coffee
• If the mixture is too dry, keep adding tiny bits of milk until it gets to the right consistncy
• Roll into balls (mine were a little smaller than a ping pong ball), line them up onto a baking tray (don't forget to greaseproof it first!) and squish them gently with the back of a spoon until they're biscuit shaped!
• Bake for 20-25 minutes (depending on how crunchy you like 'em) then leave on a wire rack to cool.
• Buttercream is standard (see previous posts for ingredients & method). I didn't add any flavouring because I've run out of vanilla essence (aaarghh!) so my buttercream was very very plain! Feel free to add whichever flavour your little heart desires.
  
• Pop some sort of decoration on top to make it look beautiful! I bought a pot of strawberry flavoured buttons from Van Hagues earlier this week, although I'm sure chocolate buttons would taste much nicer. You could probably make your own. In fact, I may do that this week....

These did taste nice although they were pretty flipping overwhelming! I am, alas, a very lazy cook and tend to pour things in like cocoa powder rather than actually measure them... and I forgot how strong coffee is! So perhaps it'll be a good biscuits for those who like really strong black coffee :D

Sacha xx