Disaster averted.

I narrowly averted disaster today in an attempt to make Pinwheel biscuits. I'd seen them on Pintrest and was looking for a reason to make them. Not the chocolate and vanilla ones, these were pink and white and cute as a button. The concept was simple without looking at a recipe, 2 layers laid flat then rolled into a 'sausage' and then sliced before baking but I wasn't sure what biscuit recipe to use.
As much as I love biscuit I haven't made them since I was a kid, using cutters to make cute animal biscuits that would then suffer decapitation or have their limbs devoured one by one. I'm not a masochist, honest! I always remembered these biscuits being a little bland so I decided to use a richer, tastier recipe loved my millions: shortbread. What I didn't realise until I began to roll the 2 layers together was that shortbread is not flexible...at all! It crumbled (as shortbread should) and I had to attempt to separate the pink crumbs from the plain with despair.
To fix the problem I compared the shortbread recipe to a Christmas cookie cutter biscuit recipe and realised a bit more sugar and an egg would make the dough sticky enough to roll. So half an egg to the pink dough and the other half added to the plain worked brilliantly and the extra sugar made it sweeter than the animal biscuits of my childhood. Epic recovery!
I actually don't have any pictures of the pinwheels, I took them to work almost as soon as they were out of the oven as we were saying fair well to a colleague. Which leads me on to the main subject of the picture below. It's the same girl from my previous post. She starts her 9 months 'Maternity' leave so we did a whip round and I offered to make a baby clothes bouquet.
You will begin to tell from this blog that I am very creative and love crafts as well as baking. I don't like the term crafty as it makes me sound sly. Not only do I enjoy the skill of making things but I thoroughly believe that a hand made gift shows so much more thought and effort than a store bought gift. I had made fabric roses before and thought it would be a similar concept (which it was). You can find all sorts of tutorials on the internet but here are a couple of random ones to get you going.
Baby Clothes Bouquet
How to make fabric flowers roses


If you have all the materials ready you can create this in around 2-3 hours. A word of advise though when purchasing the clothes- anything long and thin will create a better flower shape and socks make the best cute little roses!

Just another note on the picture above. Of course after learning how incredibly simple shortbread is to make I couldn't not knock up a batch for myself! Buttery goodness!