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Sunday, February 10, 2013

Valentines Biscuits III: Cardamom and rose hearts

I made these once before, before I started this. They are, to my mind, the quintessential kitschy Valentines baked goods: cute, tiny, tasty, flowery, and very, very pink (it takes very little beetroot juice to make a really pink icing: you don't taste the beetroot at all but oh my word you can see it). I think cardamom and rose go great together, and a box of tiny biscuits makes a great friend-Valentine.

Biscuits:
4 oz plain flour
small pinch salt
1/2 tsp powdered cardamom
2 1/2 oz margarine
1 oz sugar
1/4 tbsp rose water
1/4 tbsp water

Icing:
1 tsp finely grated raw beetroot
1/2 tsp water
1/2 tsp rose water
4 tbsp icing sugar

Finishing:
petals from 1 dried rosebud
seeds from 2 green cardamom pods

Heat oven to 350F / 180C. Mix flour, salt and cardamom in a bowl with a fork. Rub in butter until it resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Stir in sugar, then add rose water and water and knead to a smooth dough.

Roll out thinly on a floured surface, cut into hearts (I happen to have three different sizes of heart cutters nowadays, but previously I have freehanded heart shapes with a knife) and place on greased baking sheets. Bake for 15-20 min and cool on a wire rack.

For the icing, mix the beetroot and water, leave for a minute or two, then squeeze all the liquid out of the beetroot and transfer to a fresh bowl. Add rose water and icing sugar to the beetroot water, check it is a good spreading consistency, then use to ice the cooled biscuits. Finally, grind the rose petals and cardamom seeds together and sprinkle a little on top of each biscuit.


Notes: this basic recipe (based on one from the WI Book of Biscuits - same source as this recipe) is the best I've tried so far for cutting shapes, and it has plenty of scope for varying the spices, shapes and flavourings. It rolls thin so you get a lot of biscuits out of this amount - I must have got about 30 tiny hearts and about 10 bigger ones out of this quantity.
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