Chocolate Peppermint Biscuits

Since I am away for ten days in Australia, four days for work in Sydney and then six days holiday I thought I better get prepared with a few post before I go. I Have been thinking about making these chocolate peppermint biscuits for quite some time but never go around to it but felt quite inspired after my class on Saturday so I whipped a batch up, that’s the good thing about biscuits, tehy are so quick to make. Unfortunately with the rush of the weekend and heading off to Sydney Sunday evening I only managed to eat two of them. Lucky for the friends who ‘cat sit’ and fish mind our babies while we are away, we left a whole container of biscuits for them to enjoy. Nice early Easter treat!

The recipe is a modified shortbread/sable recipe, adding melted chocolate to the mix, so it has the lovely shortbread ‘melt in the mouth’ texture, once you get through the chocolate layer! You could of course eat them without the added chocolate coating…but then again, why would you?

Ingredients

12oz/340g Four
8oz/227g Butter (soften but not melted)
4 oz/114g icing sugar
100g chocolate, 70%
1 tsp peppermint essence

Method

Preheat oven on bake (not fan bake) to 180 degrees centigrade and line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper.
Sift flour & sugar into bowl.
Melt butter, chocolate & peppermint together in a pan and then add to flour, combine.
Add the egg and bring together to form a soft dough. Do not over knead otherwise the dough will be come tough and the biscuit will be hard.
Form a cylinder shape with the dough and wrap in plastic wrap and place in the fridge to chill for about 30 minutes. This will make it easier to slice the biscuits
Slice through the dough cylinder about 2 centimetres thick to form biscuits and place on prepared baking tray.
Bake for 20 minutes.
Cool on a wire rack.
Melt additional chocolate and cover the tops, allow to set.