Chocolate Covered Orange Blossom & Cointreau Biscuits

So this was one of the many biscuits we made on our day of many biscuit making. The recipe was originally from Willie's Chocolate Bible with a few tweaks...

What you'll need:

• 170g unsalted butter, softened
• 140g caster sugar
• 1 tbsp orange blossom water
• 1 tbsp cointreau
• 150g plain flour
• 150g fine semolina
• 300g good dark chocolate

Beat sugar and butter in a large bowl till light and fluffy. Pour in blossom water and cointreau. In a seperate bowl soft together both flours, mix them into the butter mixture till it forms a soft dough. Wrap in cling and chill in a fridge for 40min.

Preheat the oven to 150°C, line two baking trays with baking parchment. I rolled our the dough on a semolina covered surface. Roll it out to a thickness of about 1cm, get a 6cm biscuit cutter and cut out about 24 biscits. Space them away from each other on the trays. Put them in the oven for 18-20mins, until golden at the edges.

Remove from the oven leave on the tray for 5min then transfer them to a wire rack.

While they are cooling prepare the chocolate, for dipping biscuits it's best to temper by seeding the chocolate.

Tempering Chocolate:*

Split the chocolate up into 200g & 100g. Roughly chop the 200g chocolate and finely grate the 100g. Place the chopped chocolate in a heatproof dish above a pot of very gently simmering water. If you have a thermometer it really helps here, heat the chocolate to about 45°C and melted. Try not to stir the chocolate and make sure the bowl is not touching the water below it. Once at the correct tempature remove from the pot and stir in the grated chocolate. You want to keep stirring the chocolate till it drops to a temperature of 28°C for dark or 26°C for milk. Once at this temperature place back on top of the gently simmering water and bring the temperature back up to 33°C. Chocolate is now tempered. Taking the time to do this with your chocolate will make everything better in the long run.

*Seemingly 300g of chocolate is the smallest amount of chocolate to successfully temper. I've never really tried anything smaller.

Place the wire rack over a baking tray.vTake each biscuit and dip the top into the choclate mixture, place back on the rack. Once the choclate is cooled. EAT THEM.

Whiskey Marmalade Cake for Silke & Patsy, with icing

So I stayed in a wonderful woman house in Galway named Patsy, Silke of Corleggy Cheeses was also there! So I promised them dinner and dessert for one of the evening I was there. So I decided that they'd appreciate this cake. So..i've used 'so' alot in this post.

What you'll need:

for the cake

• 150g unsalted butter, softened
• 100g caster sugar
• 100g light brown sugar
• Zest of 2 organic unwaxed oranges, plus juice of 1 orange
• 3 large eggs
• ¹⁄₄ teaspoon salt
• 75g of whiskey marmalade
• 175g self-raising flour

for the icing

• Juice and zest of ½ orange
• seeds of ½ vanilla pod
• 100g or so of icing sugar

Preheat oven to 180°C/gas 4, Butter a 1kg loaf tin and line with baking paper.

Beat softened butter with both sugars in a large bowl till very pale and fluffy. Add orange zest and mix. In a jug crack in eggs break the yolks up a little with a fork. Slowly begin adding eggs to the butter mixture, beating till it's fulling incorporated.

Add the orange juice, salt and marmalade and mix very well. Sift flour over the top and mix just enough to combine. Scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl to make sure you've gotten all the butter. Give it one final mix and spoon into the tin.

Bake for about 45min. Remove from the over and allow to cool for 10min in the tin. Once removed from the tin leave to cool on a rack.

While it's cooling make the icing. In a jug, whisk together the orange juice, zest, vanilla seeds and icing sugar (about 1 tablespoon at a time till it's slightly thick)

Pour over the top of the cake and let it run down the sides.

...wrap it nicely and bring to Galway on a train the next day.