Christmas biscuits

I made these many moons ago when my children were small and decided to revisit the ghost of Christmas past. These are great to make for the tree but actually quite time consuming.

Makes about 30

350g Plain Flour
1 tspn Bicarbonate of soda
2 tspn Ground Ginger
Half a tspn salt
100g butter
175g caster sugar
4 tbsn Golden syrup

Family pack of fruit boiled sweets crushed.
Icing in a tube

Preheat oven to 180c/ 350f/ Gas 4
Mix flour, bicarb, ginger and salt in a bowl.
Rub in butter and then stir in sugar.
Whisk together egg and golden syrup and mix into flour mix.
Bring together to a softish dough and turn out onto a floured surface.
Knead gently just until into a recognisable ball shape ready to roll.
You will need quite a lot of flour as this is quite a sticky dough.
Roll out to about half a cm thick and cut with cookie cutters.
Place onto a parchment lined tray.
Make hole in the top of biscuit ready for ribbon to hang the biscuit.
Cut out middle of biscuits with any small cutter, I had a little bell shaped cutter ( and I used a metal beer top - perfect - )
Fill hole with crushed sweets, take a little care not to get too much sweet over the actual biscuit as it spoils the effect.
Pop into oven for about 10-12 minutes.
Take out of oven - you may need to make the hole a little bigger here as it tends to close up during the cooking process -  and leave to cool a little.
Carefully peel biscuit from paper and cool completely on a wire tray.
Once nice and cold, ice squiggly things onto biscuits and leave to dry.

Ok so here are the problems that I  had.
The sweets were harder than granite so Mr Debs had to put them into a poly bag and break with a hammer  not very child friendly.
I initially didn't use lining paper, big mistake as the whole batch stuck like glue ( yes it's a learning curve folks )
After icing, I left them out to dry and they took so long that - being deliquescent  - they became all floppy.
Useless but looked great.

Debs