Spring Butterfly Biscuits

Last week I got a lovely surprise email from Nessa at Nessa's Family Kitchen to say I had won a set of butterfly cookie cutters in the prize draw she ran to celebrate her Irish Blog Award (Best Newcomer Award). Big congratulations to Nessa for her well deserved award! So my parcel arrived with the cutest cookie cutters and I wanted to use them straight away. These biscuits are a bit of fun really - I'm certainly not going to win any prizes for my icing skills! - but I thought they were very spring-like and the fact I made them on this sunny day also added to that theme.

For the actual biscuits I used a basic biscuit recipe from none other than The WI Book of Biscuits which my Mum has had since I was little. While leafing through the book I noticed that all the WI members in the village had written their names by their favourite biscuit recipe which I guess was their speciality bake. I wonder if you dared to bake someone else's recipe was it baking sheets at dawn?! I managed to find an unclaimed recipe - it is actually one for 'Alphabet Biscuits' which I've adapted for these butterfly versions. I iced them with some thick royal icing with a little bit of red, yellow, blue and green food colouring added in for the pastel shades.

The Recipe

225g plain flour

150g butter

50g caster sugar

1/4 tspn cinnamon (I didn't put this in mine)

pinch of salt

1 tbspn water

1. Preheat oven to 180c.

2. Rub the butter into the flour to the consistency of fine breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar, salt and water and knead the dough.

3. Roll the dough out thinly and cut with biscuit cutters.

4. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes then allow to cool before icing.