An Optimistic Advent Calendar - Day 19

Ding Dong Merrily on High! Welcome to day 19 of 'An Optimistic Advent Calendar'. From now until the 24th, I'll be bringing you a daily dose of Christmas cheer by sharing all sorts of festive makes and bakes, things to see and do and of course, lots of pretty pictures - all served up with an extra handful of seasonal sparkle. So pop back tomorrow for another look.



Enjoy The Optimist's Snowy Christmas Brownies on Day 8? Well here's another festive recipe, this time from Great British Bake Off Champion Frances Quinn.

Frances Quinn's Stained Glass Ginger Snowflake Biscuits

Ingredients

300g plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

3 tsp ground ginger

50g dark muscovardo sugar

150g slightly salted butter, cold, cut into chunks

50g black treacle

50g golden syrup

1 egg, beaten

Extras

silver balls

Handful of glacier mints

Method

Preheat oven to 180C, gas mark 4 and line some baking trays with baking parchment or silicone paper. Whizz the flour, baking powder, ginger and sugar together briefly in a food processor to combine. Add in the butter and whizz to fine crumbs. Pulse in the syrups and egg till the mixtures comes together into a dough. Turn out on to a lightly floured surface and knead briefly. Transfer into a sandwich bag or wrap in cling film and chill for at least an hour or preferably overnight.

When ready, roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to around 2mm thick.

Cut into snowflake shapes with your cookie cutters. To create the stained glass biscuits cut out shapes with your cutters or use a smaller star shaped cutter to cut out the middle of the biscuits. Reserve these cut out stars to bake, eat and decorate with. Transfer the biscuits on to the lined baking trays, ensuring you place the smaller shapes and stars on a separate tray as they will take less time to bake. Crush the glacier mints sweets in their wrappers with a rolling pin placed in a sandwich bag or incased in a tea towel to prevent the sweets flying loose! Unwrap the sweets then put the pieces into the middles of the biscuits. The sweets should be level with the top of the dough. Bake the biscuits for approx 5/10 minutes depending on their sizes until the sweets have melted and the biscuits are deep golden in colour. For the engraved snowflake biscuits press the snowflake cutters used to create your cupcake fondant snowflake decorations into the surface of the dough. Bake these biscuits for approx the same time again dependant on their sizes. Once out of the oven, press the silver balls carefully into the biscuits if using and leave on the baking trays to cool.

This recipe was taken from Frances' gorgeous blog, find it here  http://francesquinn.co.uk/