Biscuit Time: Viennese & Lemon Spirals
The youngest member of the house had brought home Usborne’s ‘The Children’s Book of Baking’ and was highly excited to try out some of the delights inside. So, over the last week we had some time and set to baking two that had caught his eye – Viennese Biscuits and Lemon Spirals.
The first one chosen was a recipe for Viennese biscuits, which required quite a bit of cooling in the fridge for both the dough and the chocolate ganache. This came as a surprise as I hadn’t read the method properly, even though the 8yo had said that it’d take 1.5 hours to make when he brought the book home and told me about it! Luckily, he had a class to go to so I could get things cooling while he was out and he wasn’t up all evening baking as a result, it being a school night and all. The dough was a buttery combination, hard to mix but rewarding. It’s possible that a mixer would have helped a lot, but I do enjoy working it by hand when I can.
Once chilled, we all took part in trying to make reasonably dome shaped cookies, and they didn’t turn out too badly at all. The kitchen was now filled with an aroma of vanilla biscuit, and while waiting for them to cool a couple were definitely given a taste test to everyone’s satisfaction. As soon as they were cool enough not to melt the ganache, we generously loaded them and tried one – our 8yo baker declared them the ‘best biscuits ever’ which is about the best review you can get.
Next up were the Lemon Spirals, which looked pretty cool in the photos. They certainly tasted great – lemony buttery delights. Again, the dough requires a bit of elbow grease, but once done that’s the hard part out of the way. Next we split it in two, and added pink food dye to one half until our 8yo baker declared the result correct. We had great fun preparing the spiral log and slicing off the biscuits for the oven.
We left the fan on the over, and it’s possible that a non-fan or a slightly cooler temperature would have resulted in a less crispy outside, but it didn’t seem to detract from the flavour or texture. We all agreed that they were very tasty indeed.
There’s always something very enjoyable about baking, and doing it together as a family is even more fun.