Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Elderflower and almond biscuits

Biscuits flavoured with elderflower sounds such a good idea and now the elderflowers are at their lacy best it seems a good time to have a go. I used ground almonds as well as flour to keep the biscuit soft and, having picked a head of the flowers, I thought about shaking some of those into the mixture too – but in the end I didn’t. Some recipes also suggest adding lemon zest but I didn’t do this either. Instead I used commercial elderflower cordial. The result was a lovely soft biscuit with a very delicate fresh flavour which was not noticeably elderflower. People liked them but I was a bit disappointed. Perhaps the lemon zest would have helped bring out the elderflower.

Ingredients

85 g unsalted butter

115 g golden caster sugar

100 g plain flour

75 g wholemeal flour

50 g ground almonds

1 beaten egg

4 tablespoons elderflower cordial

(optional: finely grated zest 1 lemon)

ICING

80 g icing sugar

2 tablespoons elderflower cordial

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C/160 degrees C for a fan oven/Gas Mark 4 and line 2-3 baking trays with baking parchment.

Cream the butter and sugar (and lemon zest if desired) and then add the egg and the elderflower cordial. When smooth and well mixed, add the flours and the ground almonds until a dough forms.

Flour your hands, pinch off walnut sized pieces of dough and roll into little balls. Place on baking sheet and flatten slightly. Bake for 10-15 minutes until slightly golden. (They still feel slightly soft so leave them on the baking tray for a couple of minutes before transferring them with a spatula to a wire cooling rack. (I removed 1 tray from the oven after nearly 10 minutes and dripped more elderflower cordial on to each biscuit on that tray before returning them to the oven for another five minutes. There was no noticeable difference between these biscuits and the others. Allow biscuits to cool

Mix the icing sugar with the elderflower cordial to a thick paste and then drop a teaspoon on icing on each biscuit and smooth it out.

Makes 25-30 biscuits – we like them quite small.

By the next morning these were firm enough to pack in a tin, layered by greaseproof paper. They keep well for about a week – although ours rarely last that long.

If anyone has any advice for increasing the elderflower flavour, I’d love to know.

Ipsden Church, Oxon: patchwork altar frontal, detail of tiger lily (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

One more embroidered flower for the altar frontal and once more it’s not a bluebell. Since the bluebell season finished, I don’t seem to be able to excited about embroidering bluebells – or perhaps it’s because another flower positively catches my attention. This week I couldn’t resist an orange tiger lily (L.lancifolium) and that’s strange because in general I’m  not very enamoured of orange flowers and of all the lilies I like orange ones least. (Gertrude Jekyll, goddess of the herbaceous border, liked them best – in fact Jennifer Potter in Seven Flowers and how they shaped the world, Atlantic Books, 2013, says Gertrude “so cherished the Asiatic Tiger Lily that she looked on it as an old English native”. )

Ipsden Church, Oxon: patchwork altar frontal, detail of tige lily (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Another busy period – at least 4 wedding monograms designed and waiting to be started.

This evening we went into college chapel for evensong  as the chaplain was blessing the altar cloth. He asked me to hold out each end in turn while he sprinkled it with holy water and said a few words. I whispered to him not to do too much sprinkling on the embroidery to save it needing ironing again as I couldn’t help noticing that in the 2 week its been on the altar it’s already collected a few water marks and possibly a bit of red wine too! (The embroidered ends remain unblemished.) Phew, it will certainly be a challenge to wash, let alone dry (must measure it, the altar is unusually long). But it is good that it is now in use.