• YUM! These vanilla biscuits filled with raspberry jam taste like nostalgia.

    Recipe and styling by Nomvuselelo Mncube

    Photograph by Dylan Swart

    Vanilla biscuits filled with raspberry jam

    Serves: Makes 20
    Cooking Time: 1 hr

    Ingredients

    • 60g castor sugar
    • 40g icing sugar, sifted + extra,
    • to dust
    • 250g butter, softened
    • 10ml (2 tsp) vanilla essence
    • 400g cake flour, sifted
    • pinch salt
    • 150g raspberry jam

    Instructions

    1

    Preheat the oven to 180˚C. Line 2 large baking tins with baking paper. To make the biscuits, beat the castor and 40g icing sugars, the butter and vanilla essence together in a blender or with an electric mixer at high speed until light and fluffy, 5 minutes. Add the cake flour and salt and blitz at medium speed, a further 1 minute, until well incorporated. Wrap in cling film and refrigerate, at least 20 minutes.

    2

    Remove the dough from the fridge and roll it out between 2 sheets of baking paper to a thickness of 0,4cm. Cut the dough into 6cm-diameter discs using a cookie cutter. Split the biscuit discs into 2 batches and cut a 4cm heart shape from the centres of 1 batch. Place all of the biscuit discs in the prepared baking tins and chill in the fridge, 15 minutes.

    3

    Bake the biscuits, 10 minutes or until the edges start to brown. Allow to cool at room temperature. Dust the face side of the heart-out biscuits with icing sugar and dollop raspberry jam in the centre of the other half of the biscuit “sandwich” (on the flat side). Press a biscuit with jam onto a heart-out biscuit to close the sandwich, the dusted heart side facing up.

    Imka Webb
    Author

    Imka Webb is a freelance digital marketing expert and the digital editor of Food & Home Entertaining magazine.  www.imkawebb.com