Make Your Own Week day four: shortbread biscuits

Breakfast: Nature's Path Peanut Butter Granola with yogurt and blueberries

Lunch: Sushi followed by proper tea with home-made shortbread biscuits

Dinner: Lentil shepherd's pie with salad

Are biscuits a kitchen staple? For many people, yes - in fact, a cup of tea without a biscuit is as close to heresy as an atheist can get. But shortbread? Well, shoot me, I'm British.

I'm not going to pretend that these biscuits are any healthier than the shop-bought ones (though of course they will be if you use good quality butter and non-bleached flour), the value in these is in the making and in the eating, not the being smug about the nutritional values (although that is one of my favourite hobbies).

The fun is also in the icing. Who doesn't love pink pig shortbreads?

You'll need
(Makes 18 pigs)

1 cup butter
1 cup icing sugar
2 cups flour
1 tsp vanilla extract
splash of almond milk

Method:

Preheat the oven to 150 degrees Celcius
Grease a baking tray or cover it in greaseproof / baking paper
Cream the butter and the icing sugar together until they're thick and creamy
Stir in the vanilla extract
Stir in the flour to make a moist dough
Add in the almond milk if necessary
Roll the dough out on a floured surface to your desired thickness
Use awesomely-shaped cookie cutters to cut out your cookies. I had pigs and skulls!
Put these on the greased / lined tray and bake for 20 minutes
Allow to cool

You can decorate these as you like - just mix icing sugar with almond milk until it's the right consistency then add a couple of drops of food colouring and ice to your heart's content!

A couple went not so well. We call these our 'special' skulls.

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