Giant Jammie Dodger

by Barry Lewis

Ingredients

650g Butter

320g Sugar

500g plain flour

5tbsp Raspberry Jam, warmed

Pack of jammie dodgers for inspiration optional

Alright so you may or may not know what a jammie dodger is, well effectively it’s a delicious biscuit wedged together with jam and has a distinctive heart shape cut out and a splodge mark on top! Today i’m showing you how to make a giant one! I’ve made homemade jammie dodgers, but this is on a different level. If you watch the video, visually (despite the massive pans I had available) the slighly smaller one, yet still giant, worked a charm and prevents the need to cut out the edge of the biscuit dough. If there is one important message with this though – keep the dough cold, it gets sticky very quickly, work fast and it’ll make all the cutting out extremely simple plus it will hold it’s shape when baking.

So any how the ingredients as you can see are minimal – other than a bit of baking parchment and ideally 2 loose bottomed flan tinned with ridges on the edges (optional) you are ready to go! Please consider though you may have some dough leftover with these quantities, so you can effectively make another, or lots of small ones!

Get your butter to room temperature and beat together well in a mixing bowl with the sugar to cream it together, the softer the butter the better to help with this step! Once it is smooth and merged together add in the flour and work it with a wooden spoon at first, you can then get it out on the counter top and knead together, you may need extra flour as it gets sticky, similarly if it is not bonding add a drop of water at a time and really press it in. This is a messy job! Roll up into a ball and wrap in cling film and place in the fridge for 20 minutes at least. When you take the dough out it will dramatically feel difference in weight and structure.

Whilst this is happening get some baking parchment and using a flan tin as a template create the shapes of the splodge to scale with the size of the tin, mine were 23cm ones. Draw the splodge, with the heart in the middle and the dots on the surface of the biscuit. Cut this out and have ready for later as a template.

Flour down a surface and roll out enough to fit the dough into your flan tin, roll it out quite thin. Re-use any other dough for the second tin and make sure both tins are lined. Place both the flan tins and any spare dough in the fridge for 25mins. Pre-heat oven to x whilst you are waiting.

For the biscuit that will be your base bake that once chilled for around 15 minutes or until the top is just starting to go lightly brown, it will firm up as it cools.

For the (what will be) top part of the biscuit, use a heat shaped cutter and cut out a heart piece in the middle of the dough in the tin. Place back in the fridge. Using the template made before roll out extra chilled dough and cutout the splodge to sit on top of the dough including the heart shape & circles. Lightly score the JD in the big circle or your initials…again put back in the fridge to firm up.

Brush the top biscuit in the tin template with a little water then gently place the cutout dough areas on to the biscuit. The water will help it stick this should be looking amazing, but again place back in the fridge for 20 minutes to firm up then bake again as per the base. Leave to cool.

Once both cooled spread some warmed up jam on the base layer, lift on the lid, then fill the heart with more jam. Dust with icing sugar if you wish too! That’s it, your very own giant jammie dodger saving you a lot of the hassle in my video and great for a Birthday!