Today I’m joining the Christmas Treats Recipe Challenge Blog Hop and bringing you a lovely star shaped shortbread biscuit.

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These chocolate decorated star biscuits are a version of my nan’s shortbread that I first shared here on the blog back in 2014.

For these star chocolate dipped biscuits I’ve made a plain version of the mix and rolled it a little thinner than the first time I shared the recipe. They bake a little quicker as they are thinner and with a small star cutter you’ll get approximately 100 biscuits from this mix. I’ve done 2 different ways to decorate them, one where you dip them into melted chocolate and add sprinkles of your choice, the other a ‘splatter with chocolate’ technique.

It seems that a few of the ingredients in the recipe are things that are known by different names or that may differ a little around the world. I’ve added in brackets what you may know the specific ingredients as.

Christmas Treats - Chocolate Dipped Star Shortbread

- makes approx 100 small biscuits, 50 dipped and 50 splatted

• 225g, 8oz, 1 cup: margarine or butter (any kind of spreading marg or block baking marg is fine as long as it's NOT low fat, it just goes all watery when you beat it)

• 115g, 4oz, 3/4 cup: icing sugar (powdered sugar)

• 225g, 8oz, 2 cups: self raising flour (2 cups of all purpose flour with 3 teaspoons of baking powder added)

• 115g, 4oz, 3/4 cup: corn flour (cornstarch)

To Decorate:

• 200g, 7oz chocolate (any that you like is fine)

• Sprinkles of your choice, mine are Hundreds and Thousands

You Also Need:

• A baking tray

• Small star shaped cookie cutter, mine is 1.5” across (just under 4cm)

• Parchment or non stick baking paper

Put the oven on to 180c, 350f, gas 4

Put your margarine/butter in a bowl and add the sugar. Allow the butter or marg to soften a little and then beat until light and fluffy. Use a wooden spoon, a hand mixer or food mixer.

Add the self raising and corn flour and combine with a spoon or knife. Once the mix looks a little like breadcrumbs you’ll need to squeeze it with your hands. At first it will seem very dry but keep squeezing and eventually it will come together.

Knead lightly until it forms a smooth ball and then lightly flour the surface and roll out to 1/2 cm thickness.

Cut star shapes.

Bake on a greased or lined baking tray for 8 - 10 minutes until a light golden brown.

Remove from the oven and let them firm up for just a few minutes on the baking tray and then transfer to a cooling rack.

While they are cooling, prepare a tray with some baking parchment or greaseproof paper.

Melt the chocolate, either in the microwave or in a bowl over a pan of water. Get your sprinkles ready.

Dip a star biscuit into the chocolate, give it a little jiggle to allow excess chocolate to drip off and then lay it on the parchment paper and sprinkle immediately with sprinkles.

Delicious and oh so pretty!

You might find that the melted chocolate starts to solidify after a while, just give it a 5 second blast in the microwave to turn it more liquid again. Go gently remember when melting chocolate in the microwave, short burst and a stir is better, it’s easy to overdo it and ruin your chocolate.

You can use any chocolate for this as I said, I made a batch with white chocolate to which turned out very pretty too.

I confess, that after 50 dipped stars I was getting a bit fed up, it’s not especially quick! For the other 50 stars I went for a much quicker decorating technique.

Take a piece of parchment or non stick baking paper and lay all the star biscuits on top. Dip a spoon into your melted chocolate, hold it quite high above the biscuits and just flick it from side to side. You might get the odd splodge but if you keep the spoon flicking quickly you’ll gets lots of fine lines of chocolate in all directions. You can always eat the splodged ones to test they are ok!

The chocolate will set very quickly and when you remove the star biscuits from the paper, you’ll be left with this:

I would suggest you just tidy all this chocolate up into your mouth. That’s what I did!

There you have it, a whole load of delicious chocolate decorated star shortbread biscuits, perfect for sharing with a cup of tea or gifting in a little bag with a ribbon tie.

Enjoy!

Julie

I’ll be sharing this at these links ups.

Now check out the other Christmas Treat recipes that my creative blogging friends have bought you: