Magical Sparkling Snowflakes: Christmas Butter Biscuits-Cookies

Ingredients

• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 cup icing sugar
• 150 g butter, cubed, chilled
• 1 large egg, at room temperature
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• milk, to mix
• 4 ounces white royal icing, for piping designs or glace icing, for icing the biscuits
• edible glitter or edible sparkling cake dusting powder

Directions

1. 1

   Place flour and the icing sugar in a food processor. Process for 30 seconds. Add butter. Process until mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add egg and vanilla. Process until dough comes together. If it is too dry, add some milk.

2. 2

   Transfer to a lightly floured surface. Knead dough until smooth. Press or roll into a 9"/20cm circle. Wrap in greaseproof paper. Refrigerate for 1 hour or until firm.

3. 3

   Preheat oven to 180C/360F, and line 2 flat baking/cookie trays with baking paper. Roll out dough between 2 sheets of baking paper until about 1/4"/5mm thick.

4. 4

   Using snowflake biscuit/cookie cutters, cut shapes out of dough. Place on them gently on to the trays. Press leftover dough together and repeat cutting out shapes. Refrigerate for 30 minutes or until firm.

5. 5

   Bake the cookies/biscuits for 10 minutes, swapping trays after 5 minutes, or until light golden in colour. Allow to cool on trays completely.

6. 6

   Pipe trellis-work patterns following the snowflake shapes, or drizzle glace icing over the top; then dust them with edible glitter/edible silver dusting powder whilst the icing is still wet.

7. 7

   Dust with remaining sugar or edible glitter/silver dust just before serving.

8. 8

   Note for making holes for hanging on the Christmas Tree: Just before baking, take a plastic drinking straw and press into the top of the snowflake shapes - to make a small hole - then gently wiggle the straw around a bit to widen the hole, and bake as before. On taking them out of the oven, if the holes have closed up a bit, gently wiggle around again with a plastic drinking straw, to make the holes bigger! Excuse the language, I don't know how else to put it! LOL!