Pimp That Snack

Enormous Empire Biscuit

by Chris Davidson, Mandy Stewart 8 photos Rated 71% 131 votes when voting closed

We recently discovered this site and decided that it would be really
exciting to try and give pimpin’ a go for ourselves. But what to pimp
became a bit of a problem for us. So since it was our first attempt we
thought we would go for something kinda easy, the old faithful empire
Biscuit.

Ingredients:

1.5 kg flour
1 kg butter
1 jar of smooth raspberry jam
Icing sugar
4 eggs
500g caster sugar
1 peach
1 fan for quick cooling
175 degrees 30 – 45 mins each biscuit
1 massive 14" pizza tray

Ingredients on the worktop: bags of plain flour, caster and icing sugar, butter, jam

Method

For 1 layer of biscuit

Mix together 500g of butter with 250g of caster sugar and 2 eggs till
a smooth creamy mixture is formed. Sieve 750g of flour into mixture
and mix until a non sticky dough is formed. May have to share mixing
duties as mixing is very sore on the un-toned arms!!

Butter and sugar creamed with an egg in a large plastic bowl, wooden spoon resting in it

Ball of pale biscuit dough resting on a heavily floured black worktop

Plop mixture onto a 14" pizza baking tray covered with greaseproof
paper and roll it out, (this is the biggest size that will fit in our
oven) and bake for 30 – 45 mins at 175 degrees or until golden brown.

Dough rolled out to fill a large round baking tray lined with greaseproof paper

Repeat this process for the 2nd layer of the biscuit. It would be best
to let them cool naturally, but who cares what’s best, we used a fan.

Baked biscuit round cooling on a board, cracked right across the middle

At this point it should be noted that the biscuit is very brittle as
pimpette found out to her peril. 10 mins and a few choice words later
and pimpette had learned her lesson.

Baked biscuit base spread edge to edge with a thick layer of red jam

Second biscuit layer placed on top, jam squeezing out around the rim, on the hob

Once cooled smother the broken layer in jam, place the 2nd layer on
top (without breaking it) and cover with a thick layer of icing. Then
plonk the peach on top for the photo opportunity. Please note we could
not find a tennis ball sized cherry so a peach had to do.

Finished biscuit under white icing, topped with a whole peach standing in for the cherry

This is where we made a schoolboy error and never actually had an
original size empire biscuit for the comparison shot. But as you can
see from the pictures it was enormous.

A few things we learned from our first pimp.

1. Always have the original object to be pimped.
2. Alcohol helps a lot, but hinders speed.
3. Constant criticising of other pimp team members may end in tears

More like this