A few weeks ago we were invited to a birthday celebration (barbecue) and I decided I should bake something to take with me. Jan suggested biscuits since the biscuit baking item on my 35 before 35 wasn’t complete yet. After a quick search of the Internet, I settled on Viennese Whirls from the BBC Good Food website. It took me a while to get used to piping out the whirls and mine don’t look as neat as the ones on the recipe, but I think I did okay.
The vanilla butter cream was incredibly sweet and I was worried it would be too much but once combined with the biscuits and jam it all fit together amazingly. One girl at the barbecue liked the biscuits so much she even asked me for the recipe!
I still had loads of vanilla butter cream left – I have no idea how that was all supposed to go inside the biscuits! So a couple of days later I decided it was time to use it up. Googling “biscuits with butter cream filling recipes” eventually brought up this recipe for Coffee Kisses, which apparently is from the Great British Bake-Off cookbook. I wasn’t as keen on this recipe – I thought the bitterness of the coffee in the biscuits would counteract the sweetness of the filling but I found the filling quite overwhelming in these ones. Although they did taste better the next day so maybe the coffee flavour needed time to develop? Regardless, I think if I made this again I wouldn’t bother with the filling but instead make just the biscuits and dip them in melted dark chocolate.
I only needed to bake two more types of biscuit, so with this another item was finally crossed off my 35 before 35 list. Hooray!
Confuzzledom 
Congratulations on completing another task from your list. They look splendid. The BBC GF website is excellent and my website of choice if I can’t be bothered to plough through loads of cookery books to find a particular recipe. If you have left-over buttercream icing, you can always make a simple Victoria sponge (the easiest cake in the world to make) and fill it with that plus a layer of jam. [I may add it to my own blog some time, I hadn’t thought about left-over icing…] I find it improves a Victoria sponge hugely, as otherwise it’s fairly plain. Icing can’t be too sweet for me as I have a very sweet tooth (I can eat fondant icing on it’s own at Christmas when icing the Christmas cake…), but I wonder what ratio of sugar to butter the recipe called for. I do double the weight of icing sugar to butter. You do need a lot to get the right consistency, but you could always add a bit of lemon juice or zest to cut out some of the sweetness.
Thank you. I love the BBC Good Food an BBC Food websites.
I make my Victoria Sponge with jam and cream 🙂
I could have made cupcakes or something with the left over icing but I thought it was the perfect opportunity to complete my biscuits challenge since I only have a month and a bit to go 🙂
Well done! The Vienneses look really, really nice! I’d like to try some!