Kids Birthday biscuits, gluten, starches and egg free

I baked these biscuits as a part of a birthday present for our 7 year old grandson. Every year I do something different – this time biscuits were baked in various shapes with sweet toppings. They might be decorated over the top, with hearts all over them, but kids truly like them. They always make a point that they know how much I love them, because it shows in what I bake for their treats and especially for birthdays and Christmases. It melts my heart when they say it, sometimes many days or weeks after the event.

My current Bio-Oz buckwheat flour bakes in quite dark biscuits, so to make them a touch lighter in colour, I added another Australian staple – McKenzie’s rice flour, that has coarser texture, which is perfect for a shortcrust dough. These biscuits are gluten, starches, gums and egg free. I like to use full fat sour cream to replace an egg in a dough to achieve a better taste and texture.

I made some square biscuits because I needed to have tiny biscuits in the shape of hearts to use them as decorations for the Ninjago cake. Ninjago is our favourite Lego theme, we make them all the time. I was asked to make Ninjago cake with Loyd and Jay featured as separate characters. My poor skills working with chocolate are obvious, but boys like it so much that I can’t refuse to make it.

This shortcrust dough is very easy to prepare. It is soft and can be sticky, but there are no limitations in using any gluten free flour mix when rolling the dough, biscuits will never be too dry.

Ingredients:

100g Bio-Oz buckwheat flour
80g McKenzie’s rice flour
20g ground golden flax
60g sugar
10g vanilla sugar
100g unsalted butter
80g sour cream 36% fat
I use gluten free Crusty bread mix by Well&Good to roll the dough

Preparation:

mix all dry ingredients
cut butter into small cubes
incorporate butter into dry mixture until it resembles wet sand
add sour cream, mix it in with a pastry scraper
get everything together and shape the dough into a ball
I work with the dough without chilling it, but use your favourite option to work with shortcrust dough
roll the dough the thickness you want, I make it 4 mm
use any type of cookie cutters to make biscuits
to apply any topping brush the surface of the dough with water or milk and press it gently into topping
I used 2 types of sugary toppings, as well as Demerara sugar only or mixed with cinnamon powder
to bake on one level I used 180C fan forced oven, it took 13 minures
to bake on 2 levels I used another regime 170C, fan forced for 17 minutes