If you have succumbed to the magic of drinking afternoon tea, once in a while you certainly can’t resist eating something sweet with it. Tea biscuits are made for this opportunity. They are delicate, melt in your mouth and complete the experience. And you can now make them yourself at home.

Tea biscuits, the same as a lot of other goodies linked with tea, originate in England. Afternoon tea was not only a social gathering of friends, but also replaced an afternoon snack. The time between lunch, served at noon, and dinner, which was often served after eight, was too long for the stomach. And it is no wonder that they wanted a little something to satisfy their hunger.

And the goodies served up (sweet and savoury) very soon came to include small biscuits, which ladies in gloves did not have to slice with cutlery and did not dirty their hands with. It did not take long and the biscuits obtained their name thanks to the tea: tea biscuits.

What will we need?

Tea biscuits are not that different to fine Christmas confectionery. You can also obviously serve them with coffee or hot chocolate. And the same as ordinary confectionery we will not get by without flour, egg yolks and sugar. The best thing to stick them together is jam, best of all sourer jam (e.g. blackcurrant), just-melted chocolate or chocolate sauce is also needed to top or decorate them.

In order to achieve a perfect appearance, we will need a special machine to create the individual items. Or we could get by with a meat grinder and a decorative extension.

Ingredients:

500g of fine-grain flour

250g of icing sugar

420g of butter or cooking fat

1 vanilla pudding powder sachet

2 egg yolks

1/2 baking powder

Jam for sticking the pieces together

1 slab of cooking chocolate

Preparation:

The actual preparation of the pastry for tea biscuits is very simple. It is enough to mix them in a bowl or on a rolling board (flour, icing sugar, butter, egg yolks, pudding powder and baking powder) and knead them into a smooth pastry. Let it stand for at least an hour in the fridge and, in the meanwhile, grease a baking tray and prepare the machine.

We push the pastry through the machine and possibly adjust it slightly with our hands, making it into decorative shapes, place it on the tray and bake for around 15 minutes at 160°C – until the biscuits are slightly golden. We join the baked shapes with jam, heat the chocolate and half-dip the joined-up shapes in it.

And then it is enough to arrange the biscuits on a tray, invite your friends and prepare excellent tea.