Let's Eat #11, lemon biscuits

What a rainy day it was yesterday! It didn't stop! Perfect weather for staying in doors in your comfy clothes all day.... and that's exactly what we did, to the children's great delight!

I don't know about you, but we always have this feeling that just because it's Sunday we should "do something" with our day, when in fact, sometimes it's just really good just to do nothing! Well, doing "nothing" is probably a stretch of anyone's imagination but suffice to say, we didn't go out. As the morning turned to lunchtime and lunchtime to afternoon, it seemed that baking a little treat was only natural. We had earmarked a few recipes in our favourite Nosh Gluten Free Baking cookbook last week and so we had a look through to see which one we would like to make this week. The answer was easy but I need to digress to explain why....!!!

It's TLC's birthday next week and I have been looking at various decorations for her Birthday cake but most of them contained gluten. Similarly, I was really disappointed to learn that Hundreds and Thousands contain gluten - you can't be a 5 year old girl and not have sprinkles on your ice cream!!!!! Well ta da....... it you search hard enough, you should be able to find that Tesco and Sainsbury's (and I am sure others too but they are the only ones I have looked in so far) have other very similar toppings which are gluten free. So instead of Hundreds and Thousands, Tesco have "colour strands", I'd also been looking for chocolate sprinkles and they have "chocolate vermicelli".

Smarties are another one that TLC has never had and Sainsbury's have "chocolate beans" which are a good alternative so I treated TLC (well myself if I'm honest!) to them and some sugar stars as well!!! I have a picture in my head of the birthday cake I'm going to make. Now if this was my Dad talking, you would be 100% certain that the end result would be exactly as he has in mind and would, without a shred of a doubt, be completely presentable. Unfortunately, in my case, the end result isn't always quite as I had imagined! :) I'm just hoping that it turns out at least somewhere near reasonable and can at least appear in some of the party photos!!! If in doubt, cover in sprinkles I think is going to be my motto!!!!

Anyway, back to the bake. In light of the excitement which ensued the sprinkle buying, as soon as we saw the picture of the lemon biscuits, we had to make them - you guessed it, they had sprinkles on them!!! My Tesco delivery isn't coming until next week so we had to slightly adapt the recipe and use the chocolate beans instead but the result was pretty good!!!

You wont need me to tell you by now but the recipe was easy, used regular cupboard ingredients and the result was delicious! Really great lemon biscuits which we took great joy in topping with chocolate beans! The recipe suggested that you make the icing with lemon juice rather than water which I wouldn't have thought of doing but the result was great - meant that the icing wasn't as super sweet as it can sometimes be and added to the yummy lemon flavour without making it overpowering.