If you fancy a bit of a challenge, then have a go at these delicious biscuits. As a change from the ordinary vanilla biscuits, I made chocolate and coffee flavour and stuck them together with a lovely coffee frosting, which complimented them both really well. If you prefer to make original vanilla flavoured biscuits, just leave out the coffee (or cocoa powder) and add a tablespoon of milk instead.
Viennese Whirls should be piped onto a baking sheet, to get the lovely pattern on top. But if you are making them with small children, or you prefer to just cut them into circles, they will taste just as good!
This mixture makes 6 of each flavour using a 5cm cutter.
Ingredients for coffee flavour biscuits:
125g really soft butter
112g plain flour
15g cornflour
25g icing sugar
1 tablespoon strong espresso
Ingredients for chocolate flavour biscuits:
125g really soft butter
112g plain flour
15g cornflour
25g icing sugar
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
1 tablespoon milk
Ingredients for coffee flavour frosting:
40g soft butter
125g icing sugar
1 – 1 ½ tablespoon strong espresso
It is important for these biscuits that the butter is really soft. It needs to be almost melted, so that the dough is lovely and soft and you can pipe it easily. I made the mistake with the first set of biscuits of not having the butter soft enough. It just wouldn’t come out of the piping bag! I had to hold the piping bag in my hand for about 20 minutes, until it softened.
So to start, warm your butter until it is soft. I weighed mine out and then put the bowl in the airing cupboard until I had weighed out everything else and prepared the baking tray, because I don’t have a microwave in my new house.
You will need 2 baking trays. Grease them well with butter and cover with baking paper. You will need to grease the trays first, so that the paper sticks to it, otherwise the paper will fly about in the oven and ruin the pattern on your biscuits. Then place your cookie cutter on the paper and draw circles with a pen. You should be able to get 12 finished Viennese Whirls from this recipe (6 from each flavour), so draw 24 circles.
When the butter is soft, mix it with the rest of the ingredients and use your fingers to bring the mixture together to form a dough. This takes some time and is messy! But I find it so therapeutic and calming. If you find that your icing sugar is lumpy, shake it through a sieve.
Then squish the dough into your piping bag and, using a star nozzle, pipe the dough into the circles on the baking paper. Start on the outside and work your way into the middle.
Before you put them in the oven, the dough needs to be cooled down, so that the biscuits retain their shape, so put the baking tray in your fridge for half an hour, or in the freezer for 10 minutes.
Then bake at 160 degrees/140 degrees fan for 10 minutes.
Let the biscuits cool for a few minutes on the paper and then put them on a wire rack to cool completely.
To make the frosting, simply blend all the ingredients together and mix well for a couple of minutes, until the frosting is light and fluffy. Cover one of the biscuits with a large blob of frosting and then top with another biscuit. Give them a dusting of icing sugar and allow the frosting to set for half an hour before you eat them.
If you want to make these biscuits for a special occasion, you can make them in advance and put them in the freezer.
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