Projects/HackspaceBiscuits

Ingredients

 * 125 g butter
 * 190 g flour
 * 55 g caster sugar
 * (Optional) 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
 * (Optional) 50 g chocolate chips
 * White and green fondant icing

Makes 12 biscuits.

Procedure

 * 1) Soften the butter with 20 seconds in microwave.
 * 2) Pre-heat oven to 180 ºC (Gas Mark 4).
 * 3) Cream together the butter and sugar, i.e. mix together to a scrambled-egg consistency
 * 4) Mix in the flour. Chocolate variant: put the bowl on the scales and tare, add 2 tbsp cocoa powder, then make up to 190 g with flour.
 * 5) (Optional) Add chocolate chips.
 * 6) Mix and compress the mixture until dough-like. It may not seem to be working at first - try squashing by hand.
 * 7) Roll out 1 cm thick and cut in circles with a standard round cookie cutter dia. 65-70 mm.
 * 8) Bake for 15 minutes, checking after 10 or so.
 * 9) Roll out white fondant icing very thin. Cut with the circular cutter and lay on biscuits.
 * 10) Roll out green fondant icing very thin. Cut with the custom logo cutter and apply over the white icing.

This produces a pleasant shortbread-like biscuit.

The cutter
SolidWorks part file download

STL file download

Print in PLA. Note: PLA is thought to be food-safe, you should be pretty safe cutting icing.

Biscuit shape
While it is possible to cut biscuits in the H-shaped Hackspace logo, it is difficult to get crisp edges and you end up with a slightly fragile biscuit. The best-looking results came from making a simple round biscuit and using two layers of icing to get the green-on-white logo effect.

TODO

 * Plunger design of cutter to allow demoulding without marking the faces.
 * Make the biscuits more interesting. Add chocolate chips? - DONE, it worked fine. Chocolate chips improve biscuits.