Coconut jam sandwich biscuits

  

There are few biscuits, in my opinion, that can compete with a good coconut biscuit.  There is something about the crumbly texture and subtle sunshine flavour that pleases me beyond words.  Team that crumbly, coconut flakiness with sticky, fruity jam and I am in biscuit nirvana!

You could, in theory, not sandwich the biscuits at all and leave them as they are.  My question to you though would be this: how on earth are you going to get away with eating two biscuits at a time with that kind of shoddy preparation?

Ready for oven....

....and baked:

The only time in preparing these biscuits is rolling the dough into balls and then rolling the balls in coconut.  I rather enjoyed this process – it gets quite repetitious and zen.  Because I am hopeless in uniformity I made a ball that pleased me then weighed it to ensure that all subsequent balls were the same size.  This may sound a bit extreme but I can assure you that, if I didn’t do this, the balls towards the end of the process would be double the size of those at the start – I can’t help myself.  Don’t they look pretty?

The biscuits have the soft, crumbly texture of a Viennese biscuit and would be lovely left as singles; however, if you do this I recommend adding some flavour to the biscuit be it vanilla or coconut extract.

Ingredients

200g unsalted butter, at room temperature
50g cornflour
150g plain flour
50g icing sugar
100g desiccated coconut
Optional: a couple of drops of coconut extract

To sandwich: jam (or nutella) of your choice

Method

Preheat the oven to 180C/fan oven 160C/350F/gas mark 4.

Line two baking sheets with baking paper or non-stick foil – you may have to bake the biscuits in batches and reuse these trays.

Mix together the butter, cornflour, plain flour, icing sugar and coconut extract until it comes together as a dough.

Take heaped teaspoons of the mix and roll into balls – I found a 15g ball of dough was the right size (I got 31 individual biscuits i.e. 15 1/2 when sandwiched).

Roll each ball in the desiccated coconut.

Place on the prepared baking sheet and flatten using a fork – space the biscuits out as they will expand as they bake.

Sprinkle a little extra coconut over the top to replace that displaced by the fork.

Bake for approximately 15-20 minutes until golden.

Leave on the baking tray to firm up for 10 minutes before removing from the tray and leaving to cool completely on a wire rack.

Match the biscuits in pairs.

Spread one biscuit with jam then sandwich with the other biscuit.

Bask in the glory of the wonderful thing you have created.

Eat.