Bourbon Biscuits

These biscuits were once again made to see my team through the night shift and they were delicious! I couldn't recommend these more with a cup of tea! The recipe came from Ruby Tandoh's cook book 'Crumb'. Ruby advises 'These biscuits will lose some of their crispness after several hours, so if you wont be eating these all at once, reserve some of the biscuit halves and butter-cream to fill them when you're ready. The butter-cream should be kept in the fridge.' Ruby's recipe uses orange zest to flavour the biscuit and the butter-cream, however I decided to leave this out.

Ingredients

For The Biscuit:                                                               For The Butter-cream
240g Plain Flour                                                              100g Unsalted Butter
4 Tablespoons Cocoa Powder                                          2 Tablespoons Cocoa Powder
140g Unsalted Butter                                                       150g Icing Sugar
100g Caster Sugar                                                          
300ml Milk or Water

Recipe

1. Sift the flour and 4 tablespoons of cocoa powder together into a large bowl. Rub in the 140g butter using your fingertips, working lightly and speedily until no visible flakes of butter remain. Stir in the caster sugar, then sprinkle on the milk or water (I used water), Use a butter knife or similar to 'cut' through the mixture, blending the liquid with the dry ingredients until the whole lot has begun to come together in small clusters.
2. Press the dough into one piece, wrap in cling-film and refrigerate for 30 mins. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 180c/fan 160c/gas mark 4 and line a large baking tray with baking parchment. 
3. Depending on how chilled the dough is after it time in the fridge, you may need to let it soften just slightly before rolling. The dough will crack if too hard and stick if its too soft. Roll out on a lightly floured surface to around 25x30cm. Cut into rectangles approximately 8x3cm, although the precise dimensions don't matter as long as all of the shapes are more or less the same size.
4. Transfer the shapes to the lined baking tray and bake for 12 mins. Leave to cool completely on a wire rack.
5. Wile the biscuits are cooking/cooling, prepare the butter-cream. Beat the 100g butter, 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder until smooth then add the icing sugar a little at a time. The mixture should be smooth and soft enough to spread or pipe.
6. Spread or pipe the butter-cream onto half of the cooled biscuits, sandwiching the remaining biscuits. Chill in the fridge for 10 mins if they need any extra help serving.

When cutting out the biscuits, I found 8x3cm made quite big biscuits, next time I would probably do 6x3cm sized biscuits. Also don't spread the butter-cream too generously as too much can be quite sickly. This was a fairly simple recipe however it is slightly time consuming but totally worth making!