Best foot forward

Our recipe makes 10-12 biscuits, and you’ll need a stand mixer or hand-held electric beaters, clingfilm, a rolling pin, two baking sheets, baking parchment, a wire rack and paper piping bags.

• 70g unsalted butter, softened
• 70g caster sugar
• 1 large egg
• 160g plain flour, sifted, plus extra for dusting
• Outline and filling icing in colours of your choice, for the shoe and insole
• Silver glitter or decorations of your choice

Ingredients for outline icing:

• 220g icing sugar
• 1 large egg white
• 5 drops liquid food colouring

Ingredients for filling icing:

• Beat the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy. Add the egg and your chosen flavouring, then beat for another minute. Quickly mix in the flour, but stop beating as soon as it’s combined, to avoid over-mixing. Once your dough is ready, wrap it in clingfilm and put it in the fridge to rest for 1.5 hours.
• Meanwhile, prepare your shoe template by tracing this onto a piece of plastic (such as the lid of an ice cream tub) and cutting it out.
• Once the dough has rested, take it out of the fridge and knead it gently. Dust your work surface and rolling pin with flour, and roll the dough out to a thickness of 5mm.

Top tip: If your dough is a bit sticky, try sandwiching it between two sheets of baking parchment and rolling over the paper.

• Carefully transfer the rolled-out dough to a baking sheet (your rolling pin should help here) and return it to the fridge for another 30 minutes.
• Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan/Gas 4 and line a baking sheet with baking parchment.
• Take the chilled dough out of the fridge and place your shoe template on top. Carefully cut around it with a small, sharp knife to create your collection of shoe biscuits. Place the cut biscuit shapes on the prepared baking sheet and bake for just 8 minutes, until pale brown around the edges. Remove from the oven and leave to cool on a wire rack for 20 minutes.
• To ice, pipe the outline of the shoe in your preferred colour, then pipe the outline of the insole. Next carefully fill in the shoe colour, matching your outline, followed by the nude colour for the insole.
• When the shoe is dry, use your outline icing to go around the edge again, to emphasise the sole and arch of the heel.

To create the iconic tip on the toe of each shoe, we use white icing mixed with edible silver glitter – but you could use readymade decorations, such as silver balls, instead. Finally, add a contrasting heel tip using your nude tone to finish.