Emily's famous chocolate biscuits

On Saturday, Emily showed me how to make the delicious chocolate biscuits, which she has perfected from a recipe her mum cut from a magazine years ago. They are yet another example of something really quick and easy to make; Em reckons she can have them done in half an hour!

More importantly, the results are seriously, melt-in-the-mouth, scrummy. This particular batch certainly went down well at Ella's flat-warming at the weekend.

I know a lot of people are going to be very pleased to have this recipe, so thanks Em for sharing! Enjoy.

Ingredients

10 oz butter, at room temperature*

5 oz icing sugar

11 oz plain flour

3 oz cocoa

1 oz ground almonds

*Yes, that's a lot of butter. You could use margarine or a combination of the two, but butter will get the best taste. If you use unsalted butter, add a pinch of salt to the dry ingredients.

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 180˚C. Grease a couple of baking trays, or line them with baking parchment.

Beat the butter to a soft consistency, then sift in the icing sugar and cream them together. Unfortunately this process can be a bit arduous if you don't have a food processer. A hand mixer is one option, but you'll find the butter does tend to get all stuck in the whisks. If doing by hand, Em recommends using a normal knife, though you'll probably want to move on to using a wooden spoon when you add the sugar.

Simply mix all the other, dry ingredients together in another bowl (sieving the cocoa and flour). Then add them to the butter and sugar mixture, a small amount at a time. The mixture will get quite dry, but don't worry, just keeping adding until it's all combined into a kind of dough.

Roll the mixture into balls, about an inch in diameter, and space them out on the two trays. (You'll probably only fit about half, and will need to do another batch.) Then dip a fork in a little icing sugar, to prevent it sticking, and use it to press them down a bit. You'll get a sort of fat biscuit shape with nice ridges on top. (For Ella's flat-warming, Em and I decided to be a bit inventive and used a teaspoon to press them down and then an 'E' magnet to get an imprint.)

Put in the oven for only 5-8 minutes. Don't cook them too long! They will be starting to go slightly paler on top and will still be very soft. Leave them to cool on the trays for a few minutes, until they are firm enough to transfer to a cooling rack.

Then try to resist eating them all immediately!