This weeks offerings are some almond biscuits with a homemade raspberry filling which I think are a great take on the jammy dodger biscuits I used to eat as a child.  The recipe comes from the latest Great British Bake- Off book and I thought it would be a fun one to get the kids involved with.

This is the first time I’ve made a dough (biscuit or otherwise) using a food processor.  I think this was called for because the recipe required grinding 100g of whole blanched almonds in with the flour and sugar (before adding butter and egg yolks and sticking in the fridge).  It all went better than expected, especially as my food processor is a bit quirky since the safety catch snapped off the lid which means I now have to insert a kebab skewer to get it working.

I had my two little assistants help with the rolling and cutting out of the biscuits – Popsy made flowers and Boo made hearts – before sticking in the oven for 10+ mins.

Oops, it appears I missed out the step where you stick the cut out biscuits back in the fridge for a bit.  Not that it seems to have done them any harm.

The raspberry filling seemed simple enough.  Combine raspberries with cornflour (1 tsp/100g) and caster sugar (1 tbsp/100g) and heat through until the raspberries completely break down.  Had a minor hiccup in that I obviously wasn’t paying attention when I picked up the raspberries in the shop and was 50g short.  Disaster averted by reducing the cornflour and caster sugar quantities accordingly.  Now, just had to hope I’d have enough filling for all the biscuits the girls had made.

The recipe didn’t specify passing the resulting gloop through a sieve, but I thought that all the seeds and raspberry detritus didn’t make the sauce/jam look too appetising.  This ended up being the most fiddly and time-consuming part of the whole operation, but the end results were definitely worth it.  I was left with a smooth deep red sauce with glossy sheen (and a kitchen that resembled a scene from a Tarantino movie).

I used a conservative teaspoon of sauce/jam per biscuit.  My husband suggested that I should add more next time to balance the amount of biscuit, so better hope the supermarket starts selling raspberries in bigger punnets as summer approaches.  Alternatively, a great excuse to all head off down the PYO in a couple of months 🙂