Gabi's 5th birthday - Pirates and Fairies party

Birthday cake from Vanilla pod

Smartie cookie new recipe

Lemon iced biscuits

Fairy cupcakes

We had a big weekend preparing for the invasion of fairies and pirates - I think I was remarkably restrained in my food preparations. The Menu: Mini Quiche (I bought the baked pastry cases from Coles) my MIL brought the sandwiches, Cupcakes, the biscuits above, a fruit platter, bannana bread, lemon and poppy seed cake (damn forgot to get a photograph of) and that was it.

I used a new recipe for the cupcakes some of them were coconut ones, but I wasn't happy with it so I won't post it as I won't use it again.

The iced biscuits though were great and a nice change from ginger bread men.

Ingredients 250 g chilled unsalted butter, chopped

2 cups plain flour

3/4 cup caster sugar

1 egg

Pure icing sugar

lemon juice

Preheat oven to 180degrees c

In food processer mix the butter and flour until it looks like breadcrumbs. Add sugar and mix to combine. Add egg and continue to process until mix comes together. Knead on floured surface for a few minutes until smooth. Divide in half and wrap in cling wrap and chill for 30 minutes.

Line baking trays with baking paper. Roll out dough on a floured surface to half a centimetre thickness and use cookie cutters of your choice.

Bake for 8-10 minutes until light golden - I went for paler biscuits.

Gabi didn't like the lemon flavour so some were not iced and then later I decided to only use the pure icing sugar and milk. You need the icing to go hard quickly on these cookies so pure icing sugar not icing mixture is what you should aim to use. If you make the lemon icing use 1/2 cup icing sugar sifted to 2 tablespoons lemon juice.

The Smartie cookies are based on the chocolate chip cookie recipe using smarties instead of chocolate chips.