Valentine's Day Biscuits

I thought I'd show my love for my housemates today, as it's Valentine's Day, and make them some heart shaped biscuits. Of course, if you're not a fan of all this lovey dovey stuff, you can still make these yummy biscuits but just cut them into different shapes instead!

Ingredients

• 225g butter
• 140g caster sugar
• 280g plain flour
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• icing sugar
• red or pink food colouring

Mix the butter and sugar in a large bowl and then stir in the vanilla extract and egg yolk, beating first in a small bowl. A trick my mum taught me for separating an egg yolk from the egg white is to break the egg in half and then catch the yolk in one half of the egg shell, letting the egg whites fall into a bowl underneath. Now sift the flour into the mixture and mix thoroughly until it all comes together (I had to knead my dough on the work surface for a while to get it into a neat ball). Now wrap in cling film and put in the fridge for approx 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees and collect your dough from the fridge. Then sprinkle a generous amount of flour onto a clean work surface. You now need to roll the dough out to approx 1cm thickness (it doesn't really matter how thick you have your biscuits, just remember that thinner ones will bake faster than thicker ones so try to make them all the same size). My dough kept sticking to the work surface, rolling pin... well it stuck to almost everything at this point so I had to add more flour until it's got to the right consistency!

Once it's rolled out, it's time to cut out your biscuits. I was slightly unprepared and was without a heart shaped cookie cutter so had to cut them out free hand by using a knife. I wouldn't recommend this because it took ages and I was left with lots of different sized, wonky hearts... but hey love comes in all shapes and sizes, right? Ok let's ignore that ridiculously cheesy line and carry on shall we?

Once you've cut out all of your biscuits, place them on a baking tray lined with baking parchment. Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes. When they start to go golden around the edges, take them out and leave to cool. Now it's time to decorate them...

Sift some icing sugar into a small bowl (it depends how you're going to decorate them for how much icing sugar you want to use) and then add a drop of food colouring and small amounts of water until it's a runny consistency. Now with a teaspoon, drizzle the icing back and forth over the biscuits (still on the baking trays to reduce the amount of washing up you have to do!) until they're striped all over! Leave the icing to dry and then hand out to your most loved friends and family members!