I Bake For Attention: Valentine’s German Biscuits

What makes them Valentine’s, you ask? Well, like many people around this time, I made something heart shaped and called it day.

These biscuits are so incredibly delicious. For me, they evoke going to the bakery as a child and being allowed to pick out whatever I wanted. Of course, I picked the largest thing I could see – two round pieces of shortbread-style biscuit, sandwiched together with strawberry jam and liberally covered with white icing.

This is my version, so I’ve made them heart shaped in an obvious attempt to make them themed to the season. The last few times I’ve made them, I used a great circular cutter with a serrated edge to really make them similar to the retro ones I remember. I also love the addition of a cut-out so you can see the delicious sticky jam underneath.

This is a fairly easy recipe to make, but you will need plenty of flour on the board to make it anywhere near possible to roll and cut out the dough. Apart from that, it’s a breeze, and the shapes are infinitely customisable. Once I get some more icing skills, I’m making penguin ones.

Makes about 18-24 individual biscuits, depending on size, so 9-12 sandwiched total

Ingredients

200g plain flour
150g butter, diced
100g icing sugar
Pinch of salt
2 egg yolks, room temperature
A few tbsp strawberry or apricot jam

Method

Preheat oven to 180 degrees.

In a bowl, sift the flour, salt and icing sugar and add in the butter and gradually mix with your hands to form a breadcrumb texture.

Add in the egg yolks to make the pastry and stir well.

Tip out onto well floured surface, and roll out with floured rolling pin to a depth of about 4mm.

Pre-rolled out. Plenty of flour

Cut out your biscuits in whatever shape you desire. I got 18 smaller hearts and 6 large hearts (3 full, 3 cutout) out of the mixture. Side note, I would like to thank my grandmother, for making it so that I only discard the minimum amount of pastry. Like, none.

Lovehearts

The little bit of excess was all that was left.

Place on a greased baking tray or one covered with greaseproof paper. They don’t spread too much during the baking process so you can put them fairly close together, but I would keep about a centimetre gap.

Bake in the preheated oven for 12-15 minutes until golden on top. Cool on a wire cooling rack.

Ignore the weird looking ones

SO many hearts

Once fully cooled, sandwich two together with about a half a tsp of jam. Because I am a bit mental, I size them up before jamming, so that I can put each into their closest size-matched pair.