Vanilla jam biscuits

Both our girls like to help out when I cook and bake, but our youngest is showing a particular interest in baking cakes, sweets and biscuits.  So once a week through last term she chose and made us a new dessert.  It's great to watch her confidence grow as she learns to measure, mix and read and understand the recipes.

She's learning to weigh and measure in both imperial (pounds and ounces) and metric (grams); and also in terms of cups,  as I have a selection of recipe books from the UK and Australia so the measurements vary from recipe to recipe!

Here's one of the things she made us recently - Vanilla Jam Biscuits

Ingredients:

125g butter or margarine

1 cup caster sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

1 1/2 cups SR flour, sifted

1/2 cup custard powder, sifted

Icing:

100g butter or margarine

1 cup icing sugar, sifted

1/3 cup strawberry jam

icing sugar to dust

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180C
2. Using electric beaters, beat margarine and sugar, add egg and vanilla and beat well.
3. Fold in flour and custard powder until mixture is firm. Put in fridge for 30 minutes
4. Roll out dough and cut into star shapes. Place onto greased trays and bake for 8-10 minutes until golden.
5. Cool on wire rack.
6. Make the icing - beat margarine and icing sugar together.
7. Spread a little icing, then a little jam onto a biscuit, and then sandwich another biscuit on top. Repeat with remaining biscuits.
8. Dust with icing sugar to serve.

The biscuits were a big hit with everyone and our daughter was very proud of having made them all by herself!  (I barely helped at all).  Her arms get tired using the electric beaters after a while, and I also helped with rolling out the last of the dough but pretty much everything else she did herself (I just watched and took photos!)

What a great skill to learn - and the added skills of learning and practising measurements, and following instructions provide bonus extra maths practice for the holidays, with no 'school work' in sight!  We'll be doing a lot more of this baking over the school holidays - particularly with Christmas approaching and plenty of yummy sweet recipes around to try!

Do your kids bake and cook?  What yummy dishes have they made you, and what parts do you still need to help them with?