An Easter treat - double chocolate freckles

How good are home made gifts? Especially if it is some yummy biscuits. I thought I would show you these really easy biscuits and you guessed it-they are chocolate. I've made these a number of times and you can use different cutters to suit. Since I found some lovely Easter ones I thought I would set about making some for my kids teachers as they seem to get a chocolate over load by all the kids at this time of year.

These biscuits are fairly simple and if you have the patience for little hands to join you, they can be really fun also. You can decorate these anyway you like, they don't have to have the chocolate on them, you can just spread them with normal icing if you wish.

The book that I found them in is truly one of my favourite biscuit books, I know I've said the "The Big Book of Beautiful Biscuits" is great (which it is) but this book (Cookies and Biscuits) has a more modern feel to it and has alot of different biscuits, for example - choc-cherry macaroon hearts, Christmas pudding cookies, rhubarb custard melting moments, double choc-chip chilli cookies and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The Australian Women's Weekly - Cookies and Biscuits page 9

125g butter, softened
3/4 cup (165g) firmly packed brown sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 cups (225g) plain flour
1/4 cup (35g) self-raising flour
1/4 cup (35g) cocoa powder
200g dark eating chocolate - I really think you only need half of this as I always have heaps left over.
1/3 cup (85g) hundreds and thousands

 Beat butter, sugar and egg in small bowl with electric mixer until combined.

Stir in sifted dry ingredients, in two batches.

Knead dough on floured surface until smooth, cover and refrigerate 30 minutes.

Roll dough between sheets of baking paper until 5mm thick
Preheat oven to 180 degrees/ 160 degrees fan-forced. Line baking trays with baking paper.
Using any cutters you like, cut dough out and place on trays.

Bake cookies about 10 minutes for smaller cut outs and about 12 minutes for larger cut outs

Melt the chocolate - I melted mine in the microwave making sure you stir it after every 10 sec so you don't burn the chocolate.

Spread tops of cookies with chocolate, sprinkle with hundreds and thousands. Set at room temperature.

I put mine in a little cellophane bag and found these beautiful little boxes with tiny easter eggs on them!

Hope Mrs G and Mrs C enjoy their biscuits!!

M x