With the Queen's official birthday falling on the 10 June this year, what better way to celebrate than with a sweet treat courtesy of our friends at Biscuiteers? The London biscuit specialists invited HELLO! along to their icing boutique and café on Northcote Road to learn how to decorate the perfect miniature royal guard.
Perfect your icing skills with Michelle's top tips
Under the guidance of the boutique's senior icer Michelle, who creates bespoke biscuits for everyone from Benefit, Charlotte Tilbury and the Beckhams, we learned the three key steps to perfecting our icing. "I'm in charge of all our bespoke orders with very exciting clients – even the Beckhams are big fans!" Michelle tells HELLO!. "All our biscuits are hand-iced by artists in London, and it's a really close-knit company where we all love to create beautiful biscuits."
"A lot of our biscuits are based around London and royals" she adds, highlighting the special vintage style biscuit boxes created for the Queen's 90th birthday and the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton – now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. "For our biscuits we generally use four different types of dough: vanilla, chocolate, gluten-free or all spice."
As for the technique, Michelle demonstrates: "Once your biscuits have baked and cooled, the first stage of icing them is the outline. For this we use line icing, which is mixed to have the consistency of toothpaste and dries in about five minutes. We put this into disposable piping bags and outline our biscuits with just the basic shape in each base colour.
"Next is the flood icing. This is exactly the same icing, but water is added to make it runnier; about the consistency of milkshake. It takes a lot longer to dry, about 20-60 minutes in the oven. We like our flood icing to be quite full and domed, so they look nice and sumptuous and yummy to eat!
"Before putting the biscuits in the oven we use a cocktail stick to pop out any air bubbles in the icing, to stop them bubbling up in the oven and leaving a boil or a hole. After they come out of the oven they will have a nice smooth, shiny appearance. Here's where we use our line icing to add all the nice little details that really bring our biscuits to life."