Cinnamon & Honey Christmas Stars - We Should Cocoa #28

To get us all in the festive spirit, assuming we needed encouragement of course, I chose cinnamon for this month's We Should Cocoa. I had a few ideas for this, but in the end I went for these Spicy Stars, adapted from the brilliant Polish Spice Biscuits that I made last year. This is a family recipe from Ren of Fabulicious Food and combines some wonderful ingredients which produce absolutely fabulicious biscuits. They are really quite different from the normal festive gingerbread type of fare as these use rye flour, honey and most importantly cocoa.

One of the sub groups of the Liskeard Portas Pilot (of which I'm a member) organised a Vintage Christmas Market, held last weekend. It was a great success, with many dressed in vintage clothing, fabulous stalls, live music, a cafe and a great turn out. I had the pleasure of being the acting stall-holder for The Gingham Chicken, a fine producer of delicious Liskeard Cornish fudge. It seemed like a good opportunity to make and sell a few festive treats myself. These stars were one of them.

This is how I made them:

• Melted 110g unsalted butter in a small pan with 110g soft brown sugar and 8 tbsp runny honey.
• Stirred until combined, then left to cool a little.
• Sieved 225g rye flour and 225g white flour into a bowl with 2 tsp baking powder 2 tbsp cocoa, 2 heaped tsp cinnamon and 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper.
• Made a well in the centre and poured in the butter mixture then broke in a large egg.
• Stirred the mixture together starting from the middle until all incorporated.
• Brought it all together with my hands to form a ball.
• Cut this in two then rolled out (one at a time) to the thickness of about 1/4 cm.
• Cut out about 81 stars by re-rolling the leftover bits several times.
• Placed them on lined baking trays about a cm apart and baked the for 8 minutes at 180C.
• Made 8 packs of ten biscuits and tied with ribbon and a name tag.

The biscuits turned out just as I hoped. They looked pretty, had a perfect texture and tasted of cinnamon and honey. They brought an added bonus too: the whole house smelt of sweet spicy cinnamon for days - who needs air freshener?

The biscuits could of course be iced, dipped in chocolate or decorated in any number of ways, but I think they are pretty much perfect just as they are. They could easily be used as Christmas tree decorations by poking a hole through one of the arms with a skewer before baking.

This is my entry for this month's We Should Cocoa.

As my alternative name for these biscuits is Spicy Stars, I'm also submitting them to Alpha Bakes where the letter is S this month. This challenge is jointly hosted by The More Than Occasional Baker and Caroline Makes.

These are, of course, made from scratch so they are also being sent to Javelin Warrior for his weekly Made with love Mondays.