Melting moments – lovely shortbread style cookies filled with buttercream, jam, passionfruit, really whatever sits comfortably between two biscuits!
I made a couple of batches recently. I was experimenting with the technique of striping colour into the biscuit, by painting food colour into the piping bag before filling it with cookie mixture, an idea inspired by an episode of The Great British Bakeoff.
I made raspberry jam and vanilla buttercream melting moments and melting moments sandwiched with passionfruit buttercream.
For the raspberry ones, I used red food colour for the stripe, for the passionfruit ones, I mixed yellow and red food colour to make orange. Yellow on its own didn’t stand out as a colour.
The technique for both is the same: simply paint a stripe using a pastry brush down the side of the piping bag, add your mixture, and pipe. I used a small star shaped nozzle.
Ingredients
Melting moment biscuits – both versions
220g softened butter
100g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
250g plain flour
75g cornflour
Buttercream – both versions
50gsoftened butter
100g icing sugar
For raspberry melting moments, you need enough raspberry jam to fill 8-10 melting moments and 1 quantity of buttercream plus some vanilla extract.
For passionfruit melting moments, you need the juice from 2-3 passionfruit, strained.
Method
Preheat the oven to 140 degrees C. For each batch, line 2 baking trays with baking paper. Put the butter, icing sugar and vanilla in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat until well creamed. Add flour and cornflour and mix until the flours are incorporated. Alternatively, you could use a food processor. I have used both – purists would say the electric mixture creams butter and sugar better.
Place the dough into the piping bag prepared with your colour. Pipe small shapes onto the baking sheets, allowing room for spreading. Place in the oven and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until the biscuits are a light golden colour and slightly firm, swapping trays half way through the baking. Remove from the oven, and after 10 minutes, put the biscuits onto a wire rack to cool.
To make the buttercream icing, cream the butter and icing sugar in an electric mixer or food processor until light and fluffy. Add a dash of vanilla extract for the raspberry melting moments. Add the strained pasionfruit juice for the passionfruit melting moments.
To assemble the raspberry melting moments, spread one melting moment with raspberry jam and pipe buttercream on top. Sandwich with another melting moment.
To assemble the passionfruit melting moments, pipe one melting moment with passionfruit buttercream, and sandwich with another biscuit.
Both are quite delicious!
The Quirk and the Cool 