Today we are taking Caroline to lunch as a kind of work baby shower. Her baby is not due until July, and she will be with us for a few more weeks (if all goes to plan), but we decided to hold her shower now because of the uncertainty of when babies choose to arrive, and because I am imminently going on leave.
To celebrate, I also made some baby shower biscuits. I have previously made the biscuit recipe here. Although these biscuits taste nice, I had the same debacle as I did last time with the dough being very soft, making it hard to work with. In the future, I will stick to the tried and true Daring Bakers sugar cookies for cut-out cookies. I am pretty sure I could put the same orange and lavendar flavours through the sugar cookies, but have a dough that is not so challenging to work with.
The only changes that made to the biscuit recipe were that I rubbed the orange zest into the sugar to up the orange flavour, and I used the whole egg instead of just the egg yolk. I don't recommend the latter change, as I had to up the flour significantly to get a dough I could work with at all. (Although even when I made these the way the recipe stated last time, I still had trouble with the softness of the dough, so adding the whole egg was not the sole problem.)
Instead of the lemon icing from last time, I just used all royal icing, as I found the lemon icing to be very soft. I was not thrilled with the consistency of this recipe for royal icing - I know that I can make flood icing cookies well, but this icing was too thick to flood well, but too thin to outline well. Accordingly, the finished product is a little rough, but as it was after 10pm at night when I was icing them, I just kept going.
Hope Caroline likes them, despite their flaws.
