Valentine’s Day is the ideal opportunity to show off your baking prowess to any potential or existing beau. During these long lockdown days, we’ve been baking a lot more than usual, so we needed to come up with a romantic treat which is a bit different to our usual bakes. Step forward, heart shaped Danish Butter biscuits.

Danish Butter Biscuits are a real classic. I remember tins of them around my Grandmother’s house at Christmas time. They seemed so fancy and posh at the time, and so different to the hard biscuits of my childhood. Danish butter biscuits are soft and short and crumbly in all the right ways. They’re also pretty easy to make, the hardest part is piping them out; but if you don’t fancy doing that, you can just bake dollops of them and they still taste as good.

Heart Shaped Danish Butter Biscuits

Ingredients:
375g butter, room temperature
250g caster sugar
1 egg
2 teaspoons vanilla essence
500g plain flour
Milk (entirely optional)
Glacé cherries

Method:

In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla essence and mix in thoroughly.

Beat in the plain flour, I tend to do this in batches so the kitchen doesn’t get covered in a flour cloud. Once it’s all mixed in, you need to decide if your mixture is loose enough to pipe, or if it needs letting down a bit. My hands are a bit arthritic, so I added a couple of tablespoons of milk and beat the mixture again.

Heat the oven to 180° and line some large baking sheets with parchment paper. If you’re choosing to pipe your biscuits, select a wide piping nozzle and put in your piping bag. I prefer to use disposable piping bags and a Wilton 1M nozzle, but you use whatever you’re comfortable with.

Carefully pipe heart shapes onto your parchment paper. I used a knife to help poke them into shape as my piping was a bit rusty. Once you’ve piped a tray (leaving room for them to spread a little), pop a glacé cherry in the centre of each one and sprinkle them with a little extra sugar. Put them in the oven to bake for 12-15 minutes. You don’t really want them to get brown, because like shortbread, these Danish Butter biscuits are supposed to be pale and interesting.

Once you’ve removed them from the oven, leave on a cooling rack until they are properly cool. Resist the urge to eat them all, as you’ve baked them for your paramour, but maybe you could sneak one or two for yourself.

If you’re gifting them, wrap them in tissue paper and pop them in a box for your intended. If you’re keeping them all for yourself, they keep very well in a tin for a couple of weeks; though I doubt they will last that long.

If you enjoyed this, you might like to try;

• Romantic Rose Cupcakes
• Love Heart Jam Tarts