GBBO week 2 – sandwich biscuits: cobnut and chocolate viennese biscuits

Once again I enjoyed the new series of Bake Off – ultimately the format is winning out, regardless of whether the new presenters are still finding their feet. I am becoming a big fan of Prue (can I be honest? I never really loved Mary Berry …), and Noel and Sandy are growing on me. And hey, who couldn’t love a show dedicated to biscuits?

So the challenges this week started with a signature bake of a sandwich biscuit, followed by a fortune cookie technical challenge, and finally a show stopping board game made of biscuits. Well obviously the third option went out of the window straight away – even if I didn’t have a baby I don’t think I’d have the patience to make something like that.

Although I would quite like to make fortune cookies, and have fun writing amusing fortunes to go inside them, I was still tired from baking my series of celebration cakes, so bumped that idea.

That left sandwich biscuits. And the best sandwich biscuit in the world is … my homemade custard creams. Seriously, if you haven’t made this recipe then do – they are spectacular biscuits. But I couldn’t make them again for the blog so I had to try something different.

We had recently been to Ally Pally farmers market and I had purchased a pack of Kentish cobnuts, so I decided to use them instead of hazelnuts to make a nutty viennese whirl, filled with a chocolate buttercream.

Firstly I made the biscuit dough, roughly following this recipe but replacing the hazelnuts with cobnuts and the cornflour with custard powder. I also didn’t pipe the biscuits as I simply could not be bothered. So the biscuits don’t look that brilliant, but I promise you they taste amazing.

For the buttercream I simply whipped up butter with chocolate spread and icing sugar – it makes a solid enough mixture so that it won’t squeeze out of the biscuit when you take a bite.

As you can see, Ioan really enjoyed a taste of the buttercream …

If you wanted to improve the look and feel of these biscuits you could drizzle the tops of them with melted chocolate and sprinkle with nuts, but it’s fine to just let the taste speak for itself. The custard powder makes the biscuit so melt in the mouth and crumbly, and the chocolate filling is rich and luxurious.

Cobnut and chocolate viennese biscuits – makes 20

• For the biscuits – 250g soft butter, 250g plain flour, 75g icing sugar, 50g custard powder, 60g cobnuts
• For the filling – 200g soft butter, 200g icing sugar, 100g chocolate hazelnut spread

Firstly grind the nuts into a fine powder before mixing them with the rest of your ingredients in a freestanding food mixer. You can pipe the dough into approximately 40 little circles like viennese whirls, or do what I did and roll the dough into two sausage shaped logs, wrapped in clingfilm. Chill in the fridge for around 20 minutes, then slice the dough into rounds and bake at 180 degrees for 15 minutes until golden. Allow to cool.

Meanwhile whisk together the three filling ingredients and then you can use this to sandwich your biscuits together, leaving you with 20 filled biscuits. I had some extra buttercream left so used it to top a chocolate chip loaf cake I had made for a friend who had recently come out of hospital.

As usual I’ll be entering this recipe into Jenny from Mummy Mishaps’ Great Blogger Bake Off linky – head on over to her site to see what the other bloggers made, and don’t forget to read her week 2 round up – she had a series of unfortunate incidents with her biscuits!

It looks like next week’s technical challenge will be teacakes which is one of my favourites, so I may well be giving those a try.