After seeing some delicious biscuits with a Florentine lily inlaid with cocoa in a round white biscuit at a conference, the idea of trying to make inlaid biscuits started buzzing around in my head and, while waiting to find the lily-shaped cutter, I did a test with the small cutters I had at home, the ones that are almost never used.
I thought about how to do it for days (I usually think about how to do these things while driving to work, it relaxes me). I didn’t want to give up on the idea of making them in the classic and more intuitive way, using the same cutter on two shortcrust pastry of different colors and then inserting the cut biscuit into the template of the other color: first, it takes a lot of time, second, it is an interlocking mechanism and the imperfections can be seen during cooking. I wanted a biscuit that appeared uniform, to be cut into rounds starting from very cold shortcrust pastry. The result is good, and I hope to improve the technique a little more to have perfectly finished biscuits.
Ingredients:
- 375 gr of 00 flour
- 70 gr of potato starch
- 125 gr of icing sugar
- 250 gr of soft butter
- 15-20 gr of bitter cocoa
- 1 pinch of salt
In a large bowl, mix the butter cut into pieces with the icing sugar until you create a soft cream. Then add the flour and starch sifted together a little at a time, mixing with your hands. You will obtain a soft and elastic mixture that must not “stick”: if necessary, add a little more flour.
Divide the dough in two: wrap one half in cling film and let it rest for 30 minutes
Add the sifted bitter cocoa to the other half, working it with your hands until it is completely absorbed and you obtain a uniform cocoa-colored dough (add more cocoa until you get the shade of brown you prefer). Cover with cling film and let it rest for 30 minutes.
Roll out the cocoa dough and obtain a sheet of 1 cm thick. Choose a small cookie cutter with a diameter of max 3 cm, not too elaborate, and cut out many identical biscuits that you will stack one on top of the other with precision so that the edges all coincide.
Press lightly to compact the stack without creating dimples, wrap in cling film and put in the freezer for at least 30 minutes, when it has become solid. Repeat this operation also with different molds until you finish the dough.
Now comes the delicate phase. Take your frozen stack and little by little, with a certain speed so as not to heat the dough, with your hands make the white dough adhere to the sides of the stack and gradually add dough to cover the stack without leaving holes and creating a final cylinder.
If you want round biscuits, wrap it in cling film and put it in the freezer for 30 minutes. If you want square biscuits, after wrapping it, gently tap the edges with a knife blade to square your cylinder.
Take the cylinders/parallelepipeds out of the freezer and wait a little until they cool down/soften a little before cutting them 0.5 cm thick with a very sharp knife. Don’t wait too long otherwise you won’t be able to cut them well. Arrange them on a baking tray lined with baking paper and leave them in the fridge for 10 minutes. Bake at 180°C for 10-15 minutes and take them out of the oven (Wait until they cool down before removing them from the cake).
And voilà, your inlay black and white biscuits!
