Butter Cut-Out Biscuits

Monet loves to help me bake, so I decided to make up a batch of these buttery cookies. Quick and easy to make and the dough freezes wonderfully. Half of this mixture is now wrapped in clingfilm and freezing away until a rainy day... Monet got a collection of cookie cutters from us for Christmas, so making this was an excuse for Monet to tryout her new cutters. Lots of fun, well it would have been a lot of fun if Monet didn't 'crack it' halfway through and walked away...

*Taken from Nigella Lawson's 'How To Be A Domestic Goddess'*

Ingredients
175g soft unsalted butter
200g caster sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
400g plain flour plus more if needed
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
300g icing sugar sieved and food colouring

Method
Preheat the oven to 180C/gas mark 4.

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and moving towards moussiness, then beat in the eggs and vanilla. In another bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the butter eggs and mix gently but surely. If you think the finished mixture is too sticky to be rolled out, (chances are it will be), add more flour, but do so sparingly as too much will make the dough tough.

Halve the dough, form into fat discs, wrap each half in clingfilm and rest in the fridge for at least an hour.

Sprinkle a suitable surface with flour, place a disc of dough on it (not taking out the other half until you are finished with the first) and sprinkle a little more flour on top of that. Roll it out to a thickness of about 1/2 cm. Cut into shapes, dipping the cutter into flour as you go, and place the biscuits a little apart on lined baking trays.

Bake for 8-12 minutes, until they are lightly golden around the edges. Cool on rack.

To make the icing, put a couple of tablespoons of just-not-boiling water into a large bowl, add the sieved sugar and mix together, adding more water as you need to form a thick paste. Colour as desired and decorate biscuits...

(I divided the icing mixture into little zip-closing plastic bags, coloured the icing, closed bags up, snipped a little corner off the bag and used like a piping bag. Very little mess this way.)

Makes 50-60