Red Nose Day Biscuits

Sometime in January at the last PTA meeting at my children's school I happened to ask if the school was planning any fundraising event for Red Nose Day on 13th March. I suggested that maybe the committee should run one of their always successful cake stalls but somewhere in the following discussion it was decided that a few volunteer parents would go into school and help the children bake a cake or biscuit with a red nose theme instead for a 50p donation by each child for their cake/biscuit. "I'm up for that!" I replied but little did I realise that with that statement I had somehow volunteered to organise the event too!

Several weeks of thinking followed. It is a fairly tricky thing to do when you start to give it some thought. I had to come up with a recipe for something simple enough for volunteer parents to help children to make ranging in age for 3 (nursery) to 7 (year 2) years old and within a timescale that would fit all the children in using 2 ovens. My first biscuit idea failed to match the criteria when I trialed it at home because the biscuits were too brittle so likely to crack and cause tears and it involved making the biscuits at one point then having to come back later to decorate them; an organisational nightmare. I toyed with the idea of mini pizzas with cherry tomato noses but decided that the ingredients would be so expensive that there would be little left to go to charity.

In the end I fell upon the idea of a fruity face biscuit. Beautifully simple to make and made and decorated all in one go. So now all I have to do is time table in 8 volunteers, buy the ingredients and turn up on the day to help out. I'll let you know how we get on!

Fruit Face Biscuits
(makes 6 biscuits)

4 oz (110g) self-raising flour
2 oz (55g) margarine or butter
2 oz (55g) caster sugar
A few drops vanilla extract
1 fl oz (2 tablespoons) milk
3 glace cherries
12 raisins
2 dried apricots

Preheat oven to 190°C, gas 5 and grease a baking tray. Sift the flour into a bowl then rub in the fat until it feels like breadcrumbs. Stir in the caster sugar then add the vanilla extract to the milk and use it to bind the mix into a soft dough. Divide the dough into six balls. Roll each ball in your hands then flatten. Press two raisins into the biscuit to form eyes, half a glace cherry for a nose and a thin slice of dried apricot for the mouth. Bake for 20 minutes until risen and golden. Cool on a wire rack.