Easy Iced Sugar Cookies

These biscuits are crisp, golden and very good. There moreishness comes for the slightly salty and rather buttery flavour and decorating them is fun.

This recipe is a great one to bake with little kids! Make the dough beforehand and chill, and then they can roll out the dough and cut out the shapes. While they cook and cool, make the yummy and easy icing, then decorate using squeeze icing bottles or a spoon. They are something really tasty too and can be enjoyed by everyone if you monitor how much they handle the dough! 

375g plain flour
large pinch salt
150g caster sugar
200g unsalted butter

1 egg, lightly beaten

1 teaspoon vanila extract

Sift the flour and salt into a mixing bowl or the food processor. Add the sugar and butter and rub or process to form breadcrumbs.Add in the egg vanilla and stir together or process again until it forms a smooth dough. Wrap the dough in clingfilm and chill for 20 minutes+ in the refrigerator.

Lightly grease 3 baking trays. Cut the dough into 3 chunks and roll out one at a time on a pastry board, until about 4mm thick. Stamp out the cookie cutter shapes. Transfer to the baking trays.

Place the baking tray in a preheated oven, 160ºC, 325ºF, gas mark 3 for 15 minutes, or until just golden. Remove from the oven and allow to cool on a cooling rack.

120 icing sugar
15g cold water

1 desert spoon cocoa powder

few drops red food colouring

To make the icing, put icing sugar into a small bowl and add either the cocoa powder (for chocolate icing) or food colouring (for pale pink icing) and stir until combined. Then add the water and mix to a fairly stiff icing. You want the mixture stiff enough to hold it's shape when piped, but soft enough to pipe. Add more icing sugar if you have used too much water. You can make 1 batch brown and one batch pink icing for more options! Spoon into a plastic squeeze bottle and decorate the cookies with different lines and patterns. Allow to set before eating.