Strawberry Empires

The end of term was coming for Elizabeth at Nursery. It suddenly occurred to me that I should probably sort out a gift for her teachers. I had a brief look at the suggested gifts in Tesco, they were mostly chocolates and mugs etc. For Christmas we made them gingerbread biscuits in the shape of Christmas trees and they had gone down well, so I thought we could bake them a gift again.

I asked Elizabeth what she thought we should do, and she suggested the Christmas tree gingerbread biscuits. So I asked her if there was a more summer appropriate theme. So we went through a few ideas like suns, or sunflowers and settled on strawberries!

I Googled some pictures of strawberries and drew my own templates:

I made Empire Biscuits this time, instead of the gingerbread biscuits.

Ingredients:
150g butter
50g sugar
200g self raising flour
Strawberry jam to sandwich in the middle of 2 biscuits
Icing sugar, water with lots and lots of red food colouring for the top of the biscuits
Chocolate sprinkles for the strawberry seeds
Green fondant icing for the stalk

Method:
Cream the butter and sugar together.
Add the flour and mix into a dough.
Flour the surface before rolling the dough out to about 3 or 4 mm thick.
Cut into shapes.
Cook in the oven for about 12 minutes at 160 degrees (fan) until a light golden brown colour.
Once cooled, assemble and decorate!

I made about 10 biscuits, there are so many helpers in the nursery that I was unsure how many people I was catering for. I wrapped them up in tissue paper and bought a nice box to present them in.
They were a big hit! Almost all of the other gifts had been boxes of chocolates and they were getting a bit fed up with them, so this was a nice change.
I think if I did them again I would make them smaller, they were a bit big.

Empire Biscuits are such easy and fun biscuits to make with children. I made these strawberry ones mostly by myself because they were a gift. But usually the girls get to roll out the dough and use whatever biscuit cutters they want to cut the biscuits out. Then they love spreading the jam and decorating the finished biscuits.