Christmas Biscuit Decorating Course

Just before Christmas I did another course at Fabricando Delicias, this time about decorating Christmas biscuits, however I haven´t had time to blog them until now! The course was held over two Saturday mornings from 10am to 2pm. Fabricando Delicias provided the biscuits to be decorated, which were delicious by the way, and gave us the recipe of how to make the biscuits. The first week was dedicated to decorating the biscuits with Royal Icing. We bought some ready made royal icing, which you add to boiling water and mix until you get the right consistency for piping...so not too thin and liquidy as the icing tends to run and drip off the biscuits more, but at the same time not too thick as it dries out too quickly. José also showed us how to do my favourite thing of all....prepare your own icing bags with parchment paper! I´m getting better at it now after plenty of practice. I´ll be an expert at it soon! We then decorated the biscuits using different colours of royal icing...an angel, a bauble, two Christmas trees, two Santa faces and a snowman. My favourite ones were the snowman and the green Christmas tree. It was much easier than I expected. The most difficult part is getting the right consistency of the ready made Royal Icing and then when piping as it´s hot, you have to work quite quickly before it cools otherwise it dries up and also so that you don´t burn your hands/fingers!

The following Saturday morning was dedicated to decorating biscuits with fondant. This is more fiddly and takes longer as it takes quite a lot of work to colour the fondant the shade you want. If you were good at clay or plastacine modelling, then you should excel at this! I was never very good at either but with patience and practice, plus a good imagination or pictures to base your decorations on, then they will turn out very pretty. First of all we decorated three of the biscuits as the Three Wise Men, then we decorated one as Father Christmas´s face and finally a snowman snow scene. The only thing is that they look almost too pretty to eat!