Christmas biscuits

For at least the last 10 years I have made these biscuits for Christmas. They are really lovely and not very difficult to make. The only special equipment you need are 2 cookie-cutters, one slightly smaller than the other. I use cookie-cutters  in the form of stars.

I do not know where I got the recipe. The recipe is in English, so probably it was from Good Food magazine. The dough contains less sugar than normal, but that is compensated by the (very sweet) marzipan on top. However readers from the US or Canada should probably add some more sugar to the dough. Sweet recipes from these countries tend to contain more sugar than we use in Europe, 

Ingredients for about 30 cookies:

225 gram plain flour

1 ¼ teaspoon baking powder

150 gram butter, cut into small cubes

75 gram castor sugar

1 small egg beaten

150 gram marzipan

Sift the flour and baking powder into a large bowl. Rub the butter into the flour, until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar and enough egg to make a soft dough.

On a lightly floured surface roll out the dough to 3 mm thick. Cut into cookies using your large cookie-cutter.

Roll out the marzipan to approximately 2 mm thick. Cut out small star shapes to decorate each biscuit. Brush the biscuits with beaten egg.

Bake in an unheated fan oven for 20 minutes at 160^oC. But bear in mind: all ovens are different.

Watch your cookies while baking, because the marzipan tends to brown very suddenly.

Enjoy!

Marian