My Stained Glass Ginger Snowflake biscuits have become a popular seasonal bake of mine. But it’s only in the last couple of years that they’ve become the decoration on my winter cheesecake and cupcakes. As biscuits themselves they make wonderful edible gifts layered in a pretty box or used to decorate the Christmas tree. Just add a hole before baking and thread them with ribbon when they are cool.

Ingredients

300g plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

3 tsp ground ginger

50g dark muscovardo sugar

150g slightly salted butter, cold, cut into chunks

50g black treacle

50g golden syrup

1 egg, beaten

Extras

silver balls

Handful of glacier mints

Method

Preheat oven to 180C, gas mark 4 and line some baking trays with baking parchment or silicone paper. Whizz the flour, baking powder, ginger and sugar together briefly in a food processor to combine. Add in the butter and whizz to fine crumbs. Pulse in the syrups and egg till the mixtures comes together into a dough. Turn out on to a lightly floured surface and knead briefly. Transfer into a sandwich bag or wrap in cling film and chill for at least an hour or preferably overnight.

When ready, roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to around 2mm thick.

Cut into snowflake shapes with your cookie cutters. To create the stained glass biscuits cut out shapes with your cutters or use a smaller star shaped cutter to cut out the middle of the biscuits. Reserve these cut out stars to bake, eat and decorate with. Transfer the biscuits on to the lined baking trays, ensuring you place the smaller shapes and stars on a separate tray as they will take less time to bake. Crush the glacier mints sweets in their wrappers with a rolling pin placed in a sandwich bag or incased in a tea towel to prevent the sweets flying loose! Unwrap the sweets then put the pieces into the middles of the biscuits. The sweets should be level with the top of the dough. Bake the biscuits for approx 5/10 minutes depending on their sizes until the sweets have melted and the biscuits are deep golden in colour. For the engraved snowflake biscuits press the snowflake cutters used to create your cupcake fondant snowflake decorations into the surface of the dough. Bake these biscuits for approx the same time again dependant on their sizes. Once out of the oven, press the silver balls carefully into the biscuits if using and leave on the baking trays to cool.