Ingredients
- For the biscuit dough
- 200 g plain flour
- 100 g softened butter
- 50 g sugar
- ½ tsp baking powder
- 1 sachet vanilla sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 pinch of fine sea salt
- 1 round cookie cutter of approx. 4.5 - 5.5 cm
- Baking parchment
- For the decoration
- 100 g marzipan
- 1 egg white
- 100 g icing sugar, sifted
- Small white sugar pearls
- Even smaller black sugar pearls
- Liquid honey
- Yellow food colouring
- Orange food colouring
- 1 pastry brush
Instructions
- For the dough: Combine all the ingredients to form a smooth dough, wrap in cling film and leave in the fridge for 30 minutes.
- Preheat the oven to 195 °C/175 °C fan.
- Roll out the dough to ½ cm thick, cut out circles and place them on a baking tray lined with baking paper.
- Bake for 9 – 12 minutes.
- Leave the biscuits to cool completely on a cooling rack.
- Meanwhile, knead the marzipan with the yellow food colouring (3 – 6 drops) and roll out thinly between two layers of baking paper. Cut out circles using the same cookie cutter.
- Beat the egg whites until stiff, then add the sugar.
- Brush a thin layer of the mixture onto a marzipan circle and stick it onto the biscuit circle. Repeat for the rest of the biscuits.
- Divide the remaining mixture in two, adding yellow food colouring to one half and orange food colouring to the other. Put each colour in a piping bag with a very fine nozzle. Pipe the beak, hair and feet onto the biscuits.
- Use the honey as a "glue†to first stick on the white sugar pearls as eyes and then the smaller black ones on top.
- Leave to dry on a cake rack.
Recipe: Heike Meyers
