Spiced Christmas Biscuits

My bad baking streak has continued this week.  Its now morphed into bad icing as well!  I guess I have been out of practice and need to get back into the swing of things.  It'll happen! 

These Spiced Christmas Biscuits smell so good while baking and really bring the feeling of Christmas into the house.

75 grams butter

4 tablespoons golden syrup

3/4 cup caster sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon ginger

1/4 teaspoon ground allspice

Grated rind of one orange

2 cups plain flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

3 tablespoons milk

Preheat oven to 180 degrees and line and prepare 3 baking trays.

Put the butter, golden syrup and sugar into a saucepan and heat very gently, until butter melts and sugar dissolves.

Remove pan from heat and stir in the spices and grated orange rind.  Sift the flour and baking soda into the butter mixture.  Mix together, adding enough milk to create a dough.

When dough is cool enough to work, knead it well, halve the mixture and roll the first half out between two sheets of baking paper.

Cut out Christmas shapes and transfer to the trays.  Reroll trimmings etc until both mixtures have been used.

Bake for 8 - 10 minutes or until browned.  Remove from trays and cool on racks.

Decorate as you wish.  I piped on Royal Icing.  I also flooded some with Royal Icing but it was a major fail.  It was a really hot day when I made these, and I wasn't thinking and flooded all the biscuits at once and by the time I had gotten to the third biscuit the icing was setting already.  I had to break the set to push the icing out to the sides so they turned out lumpy.  So if you are going to flood them, remember only to do a few at a time!

Another idea for these is to turn them into Christmas Tree Hangings. Pop a hole in the top of each shape before baking, then once iced, string them onto the tree. They will probably need to be eaten within a few days, but do look stunning on the tree.