5-Ingredient Iced Star Biscuits
You only need 5 ingredients to make these simple and delicious festive biscuits (and one of them is water!). While these are perfect as Christmas cookies, they can be made in any shape and decorated in a multitude of different ways to fit any occasion year round!
Servings 50 cookies
Equipment
- 1 5.5cm star cookie cutter
Ingredients
For the cookie dough:
- 250 g plain flour
- 85 g golden caster sugar
- 175 g unsalted butter, cubed and at room temperature.
For the icing:
- 250 g icing sugar, sifted.
- 3-4 tbsp water
Instructions
Make the cookies:
- Preheat the oven to 180°C (conventional). Line 2 baking trays with baking paper and set aside.
- Place all of the cookie dough ingredients into the bowl of a food processor. Blitz until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs, then pulse until it forms a ball.
- Lightly dust a clean work surface with flour. Tip the dough onto the work surface and bring it together into a smooth ball with your hands. Dust both the dough and a rolling pin with a little more flour, then roll out the dough, until it is about 5mm thick.
- Use the star cutter to stamp out as many cookies as possible from the rolled-out dough, then re-roll and stamp again, carefully transferring the cookies to the lined baking trays as you go.
- Once you have used up all of the dough, bake the cookies in the preheated oven for 10-12 minutes, until pale golden. Once baked, allow the cookies to cool on the trays for 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely before decorating.
Make the icing:
- When the cookies are cool, make the icing. Place the sifted icing sugar into a bowl. Add 2 tbsp of water and mix to combine. If needed, add more of the water until the desired consistency is achieved- the icing should be thick enough that it will not run off the cookies, but not so thick that it does not look smooth and shiny.
Decorate the cookies:
- As soon as the icing is ready, start decorating the cookies. Spoon a small amount of icing onto a cookie, then use the back of the spoon to spread it out over the surface, so that the whole star shape is filled. Repeat for the remaining cookies, setting them back onto the wire rack to sit while the icing firms up. This icing won't set as hard as royal icing, but it should form a delicate crust after about 20 minutes or so (if they last that long!).
- Store the cookies in an airtight container, ideally in a single layer, to prevent the icing from smushing, at room temperature. Like this, they will keep for 2-3 days (or longer, if they are left un-iced). Once kept for 24 hours, the icing will be significantly firmer and less likely to smush (though it will still not be as hard as royal icing).
Notes
Recipe adapted from BBC Good Food.