Baking for beginners: Speedy Spiced Almond Biscuits

I like eating biscuits, I really do, especially homemade biscuits, the only thing is I kinda hate making biscuits. These on the other hand I enjoyed making, not only did they use up the egg whites leftover from my favourite pasta dish, but from start to finish they take about 15 minutes to throw together, yes thats including oven time!

Once I was happy with the basic mix I played around with different flavour additions. I made several batches in all, one with ginger, one orange zest and this mixed spice one. You can basically add whatever spices you fancy so next time I am going to give some cardamon or fennel seed ones a go.

You'll need:

• 100g soft butter (plus a bit to grease your parchment)
• 100g golden caster sugar
• 3 fresh egg whites
• 50g ground almonds
• 50g plain flour, I used type 00 flour as it makes them extra melty in your mouth but regular flour is fine
• 100g flaked almonds
• 3 teaspoons mixed spice

Make it!

1. Preheat your oven to 170C.  Cream together the butter and sugar then gradually beat in your egg white (an electric whisk is perfect), you want a very light mix.
2. Sift in your flour, ground almonds and mixed spice and combine well before stirring in about 3/4 of your flaked almonds.
3. Cover a baking tray with baking parchment and lightly grease it with butter. Put tablespoon sized dollops of mix on the parchment and press down slightly to flatten, make sure you leave plenty of room between each dollop as they will spread out during cooking.
4. Bake for 3 minutes then remove from the oven and scatter over the flaked almonds you had kept aside. Pop them back in the oven and cook for about another 4 - 5 minutes or until they are turning golden brown. Remove the tray from the oven and allow the biscuits to cool and start to harden for a couple of minutes before eating them all using a knife to gently remove them from the parchment and cooling fully.