Monte Carlos

I actually don't like Monte Carlos, but these ones are a different biscuit entirely. Soft and crumbly biscuit, with sweet cream and ever-so-slightly tart mulberry jam filling they are infinitely more desirable. Once you've had them you'll struggle to go back to their mass-produced cousin.

Use whatever jam you have to hand. I happened to have a jar of mulberry from Fratelli Fresh just calling out to be used. Raspberry would be traditional of course.

[biscuit]

• 190g butter, softened
• 125g brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 1 egg
• 150g self raising flour
• 100g plain flour
• 1/4 tsp bicarb soda
• 75g desiccated coconut

[filling]

• 75g butter, softened
• 1/2 tsp vanilla essence
• 2 tsp milk
• 190g icing sugar
• jam

Preheat oven to 180C and grease or line 2 large baking sheets.

Cream butter, sugar and vanilla with an electric mixer. Add the egg.

In a bowl, combine the flours, bicarb and coconut. Add this to the butter mixture spoon-by-spoon, beating slowly to avoid a mushroom cloud of flour.

Roll small teaspoonfuls of mixture (a melon baller would be the perfect tool for this) into balls and space out on baking sheets. Flatten with a fork to about 1cm thick. Bake 10 minutes until lightly golden. Remove from oven and cool on trays until firm then lift off onto cooling racks.

For the cream filling, beat the butter, vanilla, icing sugar and milk until fluffy. 

Sandwich to biscuits together by spreading with cream and then about 1/2 a teaspoon of jam. 

If you have any leftover cream, it freezes quite well. I had about half left (I was spreading very sparingly and made quite thick biscuits) so am keeping it for next time.