Valentine's Day Heart-Shaped Cookies via Writing In The Kitchen (@WritingInTheKitchen)

Heart-Shaped Valentine’s Day Biscuits

I’ve recently been sans oven, and it’s been a bit of a trial. My old faithful has a dodgy knob that I can no longer turn to ignite the gas. I’ve been trying to get someone to come over and have it seen to, but it’s an exercise fraught with uncertainty because one of two things typically happens: the service shop’s ‘phone rings forever and nobody bothers calling you back OR someone picks up the ‘phone, will even pencil you in, and just when you’re hopeful that someone will come and fix your damn oven, well, that’s the moment nobody turns up. And so back we go again trying to call them on the ‘phone. Rinse and repeat, repeat, repeat.

Now, you’re all probably slightly surprised at my valentine’s day biscuits; I don’t usually do a lot to mark the day, so to speak. Of course, you’re not entirely surprised; I have dabbled in heart-shaped things in the past, after all. But yeah. Valentine’s Day. I have a bittersweet relationship with the day itself. In the past I’ve derided it; I’ve cast it in the light of a consumerist holiday (but then, which holiday isn’t?); I’ve pooh-poohed at photographs and illustrations of loved up couples gazing into each other’s eyes, blah blah blah. But I’ve also had my eyes gazed into; I’ve been given flowers and special chocolate; I’ve been thoroughly romanced – and I’ve enjoyed it. So I am now declaring the celebration of February the 14th as a special one and I shall never deride it again. Probably.

I wanted to make these biscuits for my boyfriend; he is wonderful and deserves heart-shaped jam biscuits more than anybody else I know. So if you’re reading this – and I know you are – I love you, N. Thanks for being so amazing. I don’t know what I did to deserve you, but I’m glad I do.

Now these biscuits are adapted from the BBC Good Food recipe for simple jammy biscuits. I had to borrow next door’s smallish portable oven to make these, but I’m very pleased with how they turned out. I had some simple store bought jam sitting in my pantry, so I just ended up using that. I rolled the dough out instead of shaping it into a tube and cut out the biscuits using my heart-shaped cookie cutter. The smaller heart-shaped cutter was positioned over the dough once I had the shapes I wanted and I pushed in the dough in the middle to make an indentation for the jam. If you make these (and I hope you do) you can shape them any way that you want.

Ingredients

200g self-raising flour

100g caster sugar

100g butter

1 egg, lightly beaten

4 tbsp strawberry jam

Method

1) Heat oven to 190C/fan 170C/gas 5. Rub the flour, sugar and butter together until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Alternatively, you can do this in the food processor. Add enough egg to bring the mixture together to form a stiff dough.

2) Flour your hands and shape the dough into a tube, about 5cm in diameter. Cut into 2cm-thick slices and place on a large baking sheet. (I rolled out my dough and used a heart-shaped cookie cutter.) Space them out as the mixture will spread when baking.

3) Make a small indentation in the middle of each slice with the end of a wooden spoon, and drop a tsp of jam in the centre. (If you’re going down the heart-shaped route use a smaller heart shape to make an indentation and then push the dough down using your finger; then dollop the jam into the centre.) Bake for 10-15 minutes until slightly risen and just golden. Cool on a wire rack.

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