As this is the first Sunday in Lent and as so many people give up chocolate at this time, I thought I would make a plain biscuit a flavoured by lemon zest. I hadn’t properly read the recipe before launching myself into it, so I was rather taken aback to discover that  I had to let the paste rest in the fridge for up 8 hours or more before cooking. I did panic a bit that there wasn’t enough egg to bind the mixture and found it a little difficult to form it into the required log shape but somehow I kept calm and managed it. The recipe comes from “1001 cupcakes, cookies & other tempting treats” ed. Susanna Tee, Paragon Books, 2009.

Lemon refrigerator biscuits

 Ingredients

225 g / 8 oz plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

c. 115 g / 4 oz butter, cut into cubes

c. 170  g /6 oz caster sugar

1 large egg, lightly beaten

zest of l lemon

1 0z = 28 g. I worked in ounces

(Makes about 25 biscuits)

Sift the flour and baking powder into a bowl. Add the butter and rub it in with your fingertips until the mixture is like  fine bread crumbs. Now stir in the sugar (I only had blonde granulated sugar which was ok, the biscuits are just a bit more granular), add the egg and lemon zest and mix together into a (rather crumbly) dough.

Gather up this crumbling mass as best you can and transfer it on to a lightly floured surface where you work it into a sausage shape of about 2 inches in diameter. This was very stressful as I could only do it by handling the paste rather brutally  – it fell apart if  I was any more gentle.  Wrap the resulting log in greaseproof paper and then in foil. (What a relief when that’s done). Chill in the refrigerator for at least 8 hours. 

Preheat oven to 190 degrees C/ 170 degrees C for a fan oven/375 degrees F / Gas Mark 5.

Grease 3 baking sheets of c 10″ by 8″.

Cut the dough sausage into coins just under 1/2″ thick and place them on the baking sheets. (My sausage was imperfectly round, so I did a bit of reshaping of each dough coin and the chilled  paste was solid enough to allow me to do this). Bake for 10-12 minutes until the biscuits are a golden brown. Allow to cool for 2-3 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely. With relief I report that  over-handling hadn’t made the biscuits inedible

The dough will keep in a refrigerator for up to a week; it can also be frozen.

Once again, I found the biscuits did not spread out very much during cooking and were more chunky than the picture in the cookery book. They were none the worse for this, however, as they were crunchy on the outside and soft within. The lemon zest gave them a clean, fresh taste. My husband bit into the first and said he found it rather hard,  like a rock cake but everybody else shouted him down and said how moist they were. We gave him permission to dunk his and charitably decided that he must have been putting all the  nervous tension of his ministerial duties into his jaw.