We are having a Christmas Bake off in the office, so I thought why not put a festive spin on some cookies! I found this old recipe from Sainsbury’s that I hadn’t tired before. The cookies themselves are really easy, the icing is a little fussy but the end result is worth it.

Makes 16 cookies

Ingredients 

• 150g unsalted softened butter
• 175g caster sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 175g plain flour
• 30g cocoa powder
• ½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• Icing sugar, for dusting (you don’t need a lot at all)
• 200g white ready to roll icing
• 50g green ready to roll icing
• 1 tube red writing icing – if you can’t get your hands on this, you can use red ready to roll, or get red dye and mix some of the white icing

Method 

1. Pre-heat your oven to 160 C fan or 180 C and line some baking sheets with baking paper.
2. Sift the flour, bicarbonate of soda and cocoa powder together into a bowl. Meanwhile cream together the butter and sugar, adding in the vanilla extract.
3. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture until a crumbly dough is formed. Remove from the mixer and knead by hand to create a smooth dough.
4. Roll the dough into a sausage, about 27-30cm in length. Cut this into 16 – the easiest way to make sure each cookie is of the same size is to keep cutting the sausage in half until you have 16 pieces.
5. Shape each piece into a ball and press down with your finger creating a cookie about 5mm thick.
6. Place the cookies into the oven for 10-12 minutes.
7. Remove and allow them to cool.
8. On a clean surface roll out some icing sugar and place the white ready to roll icing on it. Roll out to a thin sheet. I have several round cookie cutters which came in handy here! Use a cookie cutter can cut out white pudding toppers. Use a knife to cut these in half with wavy edges. Once you’ve got 16 place some water on the back of each cut out and stick to the cookies
9. Now for the holly – this is time consuming as 16 cookies means 32 pieces of holly! If you can get your hands on a little holly cookie cutter I’d advise using this. If not, just some trial and error to see what works for you. The original recipe suggested cutting a leaf shape and using a spoon to create the pointed edges – I found this tricky. I rolled the green icing flat and cut almost two diamonds which are joined together (you can tell from the photo it’s not great!). The more I did, the better they got! Once complete, again brush with some water and stick on top of the white icing.
10. The easiest part! Take the red icing and roll into two red balls for each cookie, again add some water and stick onto the holly.

These are a great present to bring to someone’s house over the Christmas period, minimal effort (bar the holly) but a lovely result.