Today marked an exciting occasion.

The first outing, in public, of my lady trolley:

Oh yes. I can feel your envious looks from across the interwebs.

I got it from Ikea yesterday while ticking off some more stuff from the endless list of odd things we forgot to get last time. Just you wait, next time we shall rock the farmer’s market! …..instead of trying to cram as much as possible into the one bag that I happened to have in my handbag as we weren’t organised enough to remember ours….. We shall load up the lady trolley! Hurrah!

Anyhow, yes, seasonal baking. Only not this season (sorry about that) but you’ll be totally ahead of the game come summertime! Also, everyone seems to be having lots of rain and cold, so it seemed sort of fitting to have something to remind people of warmer times ahead!

The making of this recipe comes from my habit of acquiring random ingredients in a somewhat haphazard fashion. I bought this dried lavender at Costplus World Market, even when I had a garden, I lacked the skill to keep a lavender plant alive long enough to provide me with lavender. If you have these skills, you can rock this bad boy come summer!

It is taken from another book that has sat on my shelf for far longer than I would like to admit, written by one of the finalists from the first series of GBBO, Miranda Gore Browne, the iced biscuit queen. This is not because I didn’t fancy making anything from it, on the contrary, I am telling you, there are so many really awesome looking recipes in this book! Lots of them are very English indeed, and should be served with tea, on a tray, preferably with a doily. I digress……

Lovely Lavender Biscuits Recipe – taken from Biscuit by Miranda Gore Browne

Ingredients

1 heaped tbsp dried lavender flowers (no stalks)

175g self-raising flour

50g caster sugar

pinch of salt

25g semolina

130g unsalted butter

caster sugar, for sprinkling

Method

Put the lavender and flour into a food processor and chop finely. Add the sugar, salt, and semolina and pulse to combine. Lastly, add the butter and process until it comes together into a dough.

Form into a flat disc and wrap in cling film, then chill for at least 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4, and line two baking trays with non-stick baking paper. Roll out the chilled dough to a thickness of 3-4mm, and cut out shapes (approx. 5cm diameter), placing them on the prepared trays. Re roll any leftover dough until it is all used up.

Sprinkle with caster sugar, then bake for 15-20 minutes

Remove from the oven and sprinkle with sugar, then allow to cool on a wire rack.

Yum! Super duper easy to make, requiring very little time and effort, tasty, with a very nice texture, and giving a very pleasant aftertaste.

I made these today as we were having guests popping over, someone Andrew knows from work, and his wife and baby. Yep, we had guests! People we now know! Progress! Also, my Mum and her husband are hopefully coming for a visit tomorrow.

Everyone, let us all think planes’-are-all-going-to-be-on-time-thoughts ok?