chocolate freckle biscuits

chocolate freckle biscuits

• 5 May 2025

I subscribe to a few substack feeds and one I can always rely on to share great recipes is Jill Dupleix's. Jill is a well known food writer and I have one of her cookbooks in my collection.

A few weeks back Jill shared a recipe for fairy biscuits. Like most Aussie kids growing up, I just loved fairy bread, but I also loved a chocolate freckle. Using Jill's recipe as my base, I turned her fairy biscuits into chocolate freckle biscuits. I had a scrape of cream cheese I wanted to use up, so I put that into the dough a la the sugar cookie recipe from the King Arthur Baking website, but you can just use 100g butter. 

Cocoa is a drying agent so the chocolate flavoured dough was a bit dry. The hundreds and thousands didn't adhere all that well to the uncooked biscuit, but a quick brush with water put that to right.

Here's the recipe for you which makes about 30, 5cm biscuits. For all my recipes I use a 250ml cup and a 20 ml tablespoon, unsalted butter and 60g eggs. My oven is a conventional gas oven so if your oven is fan forced you may need to reduce the oven temperature by 20°C.

Chocolate freckle biscuits, makes approximately 30 biscuits.
Ingredients
80 g unsalted butter, softened
20g cream cheese, softened
80 g caster sugar
1 egg yolk, lightly beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract
Pinch of sea salt
180 g plain flour
20g cocoa powder

1/4 tsp baking powder

100 g hundreds and thousands

Method
Heat the oven to 170⁰C, conventional (150⁰C fan-forced). Line two baking trays with baking paper, and place hundreds and thousands in a small bowl.

Beat the butter, cream cheese and sugar with an electric mixer until pale and fluffy. Beat in the egg, vanilla and salt until well-mixed. Sift the flour, cocoa and baking powder into the mixture in two lots, gradually bringing it together with a spatula until it comes together as a smooth dough. Wrap the dough in plastic and place in the fridge for 30 minutes to firm.

Using a rolling pin, roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface to 6mm thickness. Using a 5 cm cutter, cut into rounds. Lightly brush the top of the cookie with water, then invert and press the cookie gently into the hundreds and thousands, then place the cookie plain side down on the prepared tray. Repeat with remaining biscuits, leaving a little room for spreading. You should be able to fit 12 biscuits on each tray. If you’re baking one tray at a time, refrigerate the 2nd tray of cookies until you're ready to bake them. 

Bake for about 15 minutes or until just-cooked. Pull them out when you can lift one up enough to see the bottom. Tap the bottom and if you hear the sound of the tap, they’re done – and will continue to firm up as they cool. If you think you have taken them out of the oven a bit early, then leave them on the hot baking tray for 5 minutes before removing to the wire rack.

Use a spatula to transfer the biscuits to a wire rack, and leave to cool. When completely cool, store in an air-tight container.

The end result, a pleasing crisp chocolate biscuit coated in crunchy hundreds and thousands. I think they might be a little bit addictive, so I packed them up and gave them to my neighbours to avoid temptation.

See you all again next week with some more baking from my kitchen.

Bye for now,

Jillian