Domesticity

I went to a party the weekend before last at which the hostess made her own biscuits and decorated them (in some cases amusingly) with icing. I was inspired. I found a recipe for biscuits and in between Christmas shopping and meeting someone with a cardigan identical to my own I became awfully domesticated and made my own biscuits.

I managed to do this without a mixing bowl or a rolling pin or a sieve or a cooling rack. All it took was a bit of improvisation (and in the case of my improvised sieve a lot of time) with the objects I already had.

For a mixing bowl I used a casserole dish. For a rolling pin I used a cardboard tube from the inside of a roll of tin foil. For a sieve I used… a tea infuser (yes, as I said it took a lot of time) and for a cooling rack I used the grill from my grill pan.

The biscuits (orange and chocolate) did not turn out ghastly to the extent that I would be perfectly at ease should someone other than me eat them and so I intend to give them to family at Christmas.

I had a test run of icing them. There were some non-orange and chocolate ones (which were my test batch and which did turn out ghastly and so I will have to eat them myself) and some orange and chocolate ones which were slightly overdone (and therefore also ghastly) and you will be able to see from the photograph that two of them had accidents (one more horrific than the other).

I have a dilemma, however. How do I allow the icing to set without the biscuits going soft?

I told my Mum I had been making biscuits expecting her to be quite impressed at my domesticity but instead she just asked me if I were bored.