Bake Day Wednesday 2016: Week 2: Biscuit week

So Bake Off started last week, and I joined in with cake week by baking a less an illustrious marble cake. Actually it was more in keeping with the show than I had planned: my white chocolate ganache was definitely more like a drizzle than icing, and as last week's signature challenge was drizzle cakes, I'm going to claim my cake as a chocolate drizzle cake!

This week is biscuit week, and I've tried out two new (to me) recipes: coffee kisses and jam thumbprint cookies, both from The Great British Bake Off: Big Book of Baking. Both recipes are pretty basic: mix flour and sugar, rub in butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs, then bind together with an egg and some flavouring (milk and vanilla for the thumbprint biscuits, coffee for the coffee kisses). I had fun rolling the biscuits into balls to go on the baking tray, and my son loved making thumbprints in the jammy ones (his thumbs, with their short nails, are much better suited to making thumbprints in dough than mine!).

Dough for the coffee kisses

Little thumbprints

The jam biscuit recipe specifically said not to use conserve, but that was all we had, so I was careful to only put the fruitier bits into the holes made by the thumbprints, rather than the syrup.

Sticky jam

I had a little difficulty making the filling for the coffee kisses; I needed 150g icing sugar, but only had 80g (and only realised after I had weighed the butter out), so I had to go with making less icing than was ideal.

Both sets of biscuits turned out well, and we had a lovely time making them. Turns out baking is much less stressful when everything goes to plan!

Left: jam thumbprint cookies; right: coffee kisses

Is anyone else baking along with Bake Off? If you are, I'd love you to share your bakes in the comments below.