Planning to bake biscuits this holiday season but can’t decide which one? Try experimenting with Snowman biscuits as they are easy to make and will leave a lasting impression on the guests, especially the little ones. This biscuit is perfect for the holiday season because even if it is not a white Christmas this year, the decorated cookies bring with them a hint of snow.
Top tip: To make things easier on the 25th, you can bake and freeze these biscuits and bring them out on Christmas Eve for your kids to decorate. They might not look perfect, but it is a great bonding activity for the holiday season. Plus, it adds a personal touch to the cookies, and your guests will enjoy them so much more since your little ones personally decorated them.
Ingredients
For the biscuits
- ½ cup butter, softened
- ¾ cup golden caster sugar
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 ½ cups + 1 tablespoon plain flour, plus extra for dusting
For the decoration
- 2 cups + ¾ cup white fondant icing
- 2 teaspoons icing sugar for dusting
- 100g pack of mixed red, yellow, black, and blue ready-to-roll icing
- Tube white icing for sticking
- Tube black icing
Preparation
For the biscuits
- Heat the oven to 374 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Take a bowl, add in butter along with sugar, and cream it until pale and fluffy.
- Mix in the egg and vanilla extract.
- Add in the flour and mix till it forms a soft dough.
- Remove the dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead gently until smooth.
- Put the dough on a plate, cover it, and chill it for at least 2 hours.
- Remove the chilled dough, place it on a lightly floured surface, and roll it out to a thickness of around 0.5 cm.
- With the help of a cookie cutter, stamp out 7 cm rounds. Re-roll the trimmings and repeat.
- Transfer the cutout biscuits to two lined baking trays and bake for 8-14 minutes until the edges turn lightly golden in color.
- Let it cool completely before proceeding to the next step.
Decorating the biscuits for Christmas
- To decorate the biscuits, roll out the white fondant icing on a surface lightly dusted with icing sugar.
- Stamp out 7 cm circles using the same cookie cutter as before. Use a dab of the white tube of icing to stick a fondant cutout on each biscuit.
- Make green icing by kneading together some of the yellow and blue icing (knead it well unless you like the marbled look). Similarly, knead together red and yellow icing to make the orange color. Alternatively, you can buy separate packs of each color.
- Once you get the colors, roll out one icing color at a time. Stamp out a 7 cm circle of icing, cut it in half, and stick it on the white fondant for a hat.
- To amp up the hat even further, cut a strip of another color and make some markings to make it look like the elasticated band of a hat, then trim it to fit and stick it on. Repeat with all the biscuits, mixing and matching colors.
- If your kids like, decorate the hats with icing spots and stripes. Roll out balls of colored icing and poke holes with a cocktail stick to resemble pom poms. Stick these poms poms on the hat.
- Make lumpy balls of the orange icing for noses and roll out balls of the black icing for eyes. Press down to flatten, then stick on with white icing. Use the tube of black icing to pipe rows of dots for the smiles. Leave to set.
The best part is, after you bake the cookies and prep the icing, you can leave it to the kids to decorate the biscuits for Christmas. Let them use their imagination and come up with a snowman (or any decoration) of their choice.
You can even use those tiny hands to help you with kneading and cutting shapes with the cookie cutter. Once all done, you can store these biscuits for up to five days in an airtight container, provided your munchkins don’t get their little hands in there before the 25th. Happy baking!
