Today I am going to share with you my recipe for Christmas Light Cookies! These biscuits are extremely easy to make and the dough requires no chilling before baking! Once baked and cooled, you can decorate the biscuits with royal icing and chocolate M&Ms! Cutting them in half makes them look like colourful lights dangling on a string on these cute Christmas Light Cookies!
A colourful and fun addition to your tin of Christmas biscuits and lovely enjoyed with a cup of tea or coffee!
Check out the video here:
Super Easy Biscuit Dough
The dough I used to make these Christmas Light Cookies is a slight variation of my basic, easy biscuit dough recipe. The dough is extremely easy to make and is ready in no time! All you do is cream together the butter and sugar, add the egg, a little lemon and mandarin/orange zest and finally the flour to make a smooth dough.
The best thing about my easy biscuit dough is that it is ready to go immediately and does not need any chilling in the fridge before rolling! Roll the dough out between two pieces of clingfilm to minimise the extra flour added to the dough, as well as the cleaning up! Then you can cut the dough into shapes with biscuit cutter, place them on a lined baking tray and bake! Easy, peasy lemon squeezy!
Decorating with Royal Icing
To create the best effect when icing biscuits, the best choice of icing to use is royal icing. Royal icing holds in shape a lot better when piped and also hardens completely once dried! This means your decorations will stay the way they are and not smudge once touching other biscuits in the tin!
Unlike water icing, which I used in my original recipe and is made by simply mixing icing sugar and water/lemon juice, royal icing is made using raw egg whites. As the eggs aren´t cooked, it is best to use very fresh eggs when making royal icing! If you don´t like the thought of using raw eggs, you can also use royal icing sugar, which contains dried egg white powder. However, this is a little harder to find in an average supermarket!
To make royal icing, the egg whites are whisked with a little lemon juice before adding enough icing sugar (you´ll need quite a lot!) to reach a pipeable or spreadable consistency! Check out my baking basics post for more tips and a basic recipe for royal icing!
Pipe an outline with the thicker icing. 
Use a toothpick to ease the icing into all the free spaces. 
Use the black piping icing to pipe three lines across. 
Decorate with Chocolate M&M halves!
More Christmas Biscuit Recipes
Make sure to check out some of the other Christmas Biscuit Recipes I have on my blog!
- Vanilla Crescents | “Vanillekipferl”
- Traditional Scottish Shortbread Recipe
- Gingerbread Men
- Hazelnut Shortbread with Dark Chocolate “Haselnussbrot”
- Chocolate Orange Crescents | Schoko Orangen Kipferl
- Coconut Macarons | Kokosmakronen
- Spritzgebäck | German Piped Christmas Biscuits
- German “Baumkuchenspitzen” with Rum
- Salted Peanut and Apricot Florentines
- Christmas Light Cookies
- Coconut Star Christmas Biscuits
- German Schwarz-Weiß Gebäck | Checkerboard and Pinwheel Biscuits
- German Lebkuchen (Elisenlebkuchen) | Traditional German Gingerbread
Christmas Light Biscuits
Recipe
Ingredients (makes 24 biscuits):
FOR THE DOUGH:
- 100g butter
- 100g caster sugar
- 1 medium egg, lightly beaten
- Zest of 1 mandarin or orange
- Zest of 1 lemon
- 280g plain flour
FOR THE ROYAL ICING:
- 2 egg whites
- 1 tsp lemon juice
- 400-500g icing sugar
TO DECORATE:
- Black gel food colouring
- 250g Chocolate M&Ms, cut in half
Method:
- Preheat the oven to 190°C/170°C fan.
- To make the dough, first cream together the butter and the sugar with an electric whisk until pale and fluffy. Next, gradually beat in the egg, lemon and mandarin/orange zest.
- Stir in the flour, then knead the mixture with your hands until it comes together in a smooth dough.
- Roll the dough out between two pieces of clingfilm until about 0.5cm thick. Use a round biscuit cutter measuring 6cm in diameter to cut out shapes before laying them on a baking sheet lined with baking paper.
- Bake in the preheated oven for 10-12 minutes until golden brown.
- Leave the biscuits to cool on the baking tray for a few minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool completely.
- To make the royal icing, whisk together the egg whites and lemon juice until frothy. Gradually add the icing sugar, whisking well between each addition, until you reach a consistency that is thick but still runny enough to flood the inside parts of your biscuit.
- Transfer about 1/3 of the icing to a smaller bowl and then divide that amount between two bowls again. Add a little more icing sugar to one of the bowls to create a thick white icing that will hold its shape once piped. Do the same with the other portion, before mixing in some black gel food colouring to colour it a dark black colour. Spoon the two portions of icing into piping or freezer bags and cut off a small corner to create a hole for piping.
- To ice your biscuits, start by piping a ring of the white icing around the edges of your biscuits. Set aside to firm up while you are doing this for all of the biscuits.
- Next, take some of the white, runnier icing and dollop a teaspoonful into the middle of each biscuit. Use a toothpick to carefully easy the icing towards the sides of the biscuit until the inside ring is fully “flooded” with icing.
- Once the white icing in the centre has started to harden a little, use the black icing to pipe three lines across the biscuits to create the “strings” for your “Christmas lights” to hang off of. Carefully press some of the M&M halves along the black icing to create a “hanging Christmas tree lights” effect.
- Leave the icing to harden completely before storing the biscuits in an air-tight tin.
You are my inhalation , I own few blogs and often run out from to post. Sidonnie Clayborn O’Rourke