Decorated Biscuits with Renshaw's New Coloured Marzipan

One thing I like to do in my spare time is spend some time in the kitchen making some sweet treats. The lovely people at Renshaw Baking kindly sent me some of their new coloured marzipans* to review so I'm trying my hand at some biscuits.

I was sent six different colours to try (pink/green/black/blue/red and yellow) so I wanted to create a design which was really bright and colourful. 

First you need to create your biscuits, I found this simple recipe online using a few ingredients:

125g Butter

55g Caster Sugar

180g Plain Flour

1. Preheat the oven to 190 celsius (slightly less if you have a fan oven)

2. Mix the butter and sugar together in a mixing bowl until smooth. Then sift in the flour and combine gradually until you have a creamy paste.

3. Wrap the mix in cling film and put it in the fridge. Allow it to cool for at least 30 minutes.

4. Once the dough has hardened remove the cling film and knead it until it’s pliable.

5. Lightly dust your work surface with icing sugar and roll out your dough.

6. Use a circle cutter to press out approximately 24 biscuits

7. Grease and line a baking tray and bake your biscuits for about 12 minutes or until they are lightly golden in colour.

8. Remove from the oven and leave to cool on a wire rack before decorating.

Next came the fun part where I got to play with all the new colours of icing!

1. Firstly you need to knead the marzipan to make it easier to work with, dust your surface with icing sugar to make sure that it doesn't stick to the surface. I use a polypropylene rolling pin as I find that marzipan gets stuck to wooden ones. I picked mine up from Lakelands.

2. Roll out your marzipan until it is about 3mm thick.

3. Use the circle cutter to cut out circles which will go on top of your biscuits.

4. I used a small star cutter and a butterfly to make the additional decorations on the top.

5. Use a little bit of jam as an adhesive to stick the marzipan to your biscuits.

Voila, the perfect tea time accompaniment!

You can buy all of the new coloured marzipans from the Renshaw online shop for an offer price of £1.99 each for 250g.

Have you tried using marzipan before?

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DIY | Simple Washi Tape Tea Light Candles

For me, Sunday's are all about relaxing and doing something that makes me feel happy, so today I'm bringing you a really simple DIY using a few things I had to hand in my craft box.

I picked up a pack of simple tea lights from IKEA last time I visited which were £1.75 for a pack of 100 and found some washi tape in various colours and designs which I had bought from eBay (they have an amazing selection).

I then wound the washi tape around the side of the tea lights and once it had gone all the way around just snipped the extra with some scissors.

It's a really simple idea which brightens up a plain pack of tealights, and they look beautiful on my windowsill. I plan to burn them later on when it gets dark.

I'm now looking up other ways to use washi tape and will hopefully try to make some more DIY's soon.

Do you like washi tape? 

What craft projects have you made with it?

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