Stained glass window robins
DO NOT MAKE THESE BISCUITS – well MAKE THE BISCUIT but FORGET ABOUT THE BOILED SWEET. There, I feel better already.
350 g SR flour
100 g unsalted butter, cubed
175 g caster sugar
1 large egg
1 teasp vanilla extract
4 tbsp golden syrup, warmed
12 red boiled sweets (i.e. 1 for every 2 biscuits), broken up
Stained glass window robins
Preheat oven to 180°C/ 160°C for a fan oven/350°F/Gas Mark 4.
Line 2 baking sheets with baking paper.
Sift flour into a large bowl and into this rub the butter until it looks like breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar. In a separate bowl whisk egg, vanilla extract and golden syrup and pour this into the middle of the flour and butter mixture. Mix until a smooth dough is formed. Wrap in clingfilm and chill in the refrigerator for 30 mins.
After the dough has rested in the fridge, roll out the dough (either between 2 sheets of greaseproof paper or 2 pieces of cling film rather than on a floured board which can make the mixture too dry). Cut out the biscuits with a fancy cutter.
Transfer to baking trays and cut out a hole in the middle of the biscuits. Fill this hole with half a broken sweet which has been crushed previously. (If you want to hang these from a Christmas tree, make a little hole in the top of the biscuits – use a skewer or something similar).
Bake for 10-12 minutes or until the sweets are melted. (Make sure the little holes for hanging are still there – re-pierce if necessary. When cold thread a ribbon through the holes.) Two trays of biscuits but lots of dough remains. This I have frozen.
Stained glass window robins
I have long wanted to make stained glass biscuits – I don’t really know why, except that I remember seeing some similar at a school fair years ago and thought how pretty they looked. When I was small, my father regularly bought a quarter of boiled sweets funnelled out from one of those big sweet jars lining the shelf behind the counter of the local corner shop. He would then hide away the little paper bag containing them and at various times of his own choosing magic it up and ponderously hand the sweets out, one at a time, precious like little shiny jewels. I never particularly liked them.
I am probably not the only person who doesn’t care for boiled sweets as they have not been easy to find – every supermarket, mini market and newsagent has masses of cellophane packets of mainly gummy sweets, for which Haribo reigns supreme. Eventually, last Saturday, I found a packet of Fox’s Glacier Fruits in Paddington Station Smiths and, wouldn’t you know it, by the time I got home I discovered the vicar had also been successful having found a different brand from the newish old-style sweet shop in Wallingford. Now was obviously the time to make the biscuits.
“Cut up the sweets” the original recipe optimistically suggested. I took up a hammer and suitably crushed the Fox’s Glacier Fruits but the sweets the vicar had bought remained intact however hard I hit them, so I discarded these. Not for the first time I began to wonder why I was making these biscuits. This thought became more insistent when cooking was over as these were very nice biscuits with an unpleasant hard centre. Who on earth would want their children to eat one of these? I certainly wouldn’t. I took them to church suggesting people nibbled round the hard bit and then threw it away. Kitchen paper was provided.
Ipsden children’s Epiphany service: Crowns fit for kings
This was our second children’s service at Ipsden – not counting Christingle -and such are the vaguaries of country parishes that we had 14 adults, a 12 year-old and a baby of just under a year. We were not disheartened for in order to create a pattern – say the second Sunday in a month for the children’s service – you have to set it (to quote from my newly acquired knitting terminology). With no children, channelling the inner child seemed to come only too easily to the adults who dipped into pots of sequins, mounds of bright feathers and artificial flowers to decorate gold crowns in celebration of Epiphany. (I should have brought my discarded sweets for decoration too – although they were probably too heavy for any known glue.) Some stalwarts had a biscuit and we agreed jam would have been better. None of the plain biscuits stamped with a lion remained. The 12 year old led us in prayers she had written, while the baby, who came courtesy of a visiting trainee priest, behaved perfectly. The vicar is still nibbling his way around the robin biscuits. Lots of dough remains which I have frozen.
