Easy Cheese Biscuits

I am making cheese biscuits as part of my mini Christmas hamper style gifts this year. These are so easy to make and sooo yummy (my brother specifically requests them every Christmas). This year I am doing real little bite sized biscuits, but you could make less in a larger size with this recipe.

Ingredients (makes around 60 small biscuits)
250g mature cheese (I used around 2/3 normal cheese and 1/3 low fat cheese)
250g butter
250g plain flour

Optional Ingredients (to add some pizazz!)
Dried Oregano
Paprika
Black Pepper

Preheat the oven to 180ºC

Method
This is one of the recipes I get the food processor out for, even if it's a bit of a nightmare to clean. The reason being I hate grating. I also have hot hands which aren't good for pastry.

First off, grate all the cheese and the butter.

Combine the grated cheese and butter with the flour in a large bowl and return to the food processor.

This is where to decide whether you want plain cheese biscuits (which are delicious) or flavoured ones. I made two lots of mixture - one as plain cheese and the second with 2 teaspoons of dried oregano and some black pepper added at this stage. This will flavour from the inside.

Combine the ingredients until it starts clunking around in the processor (or to phrase it normally, until it forms large breadcrumbs of dough!!).

Remove from the food processor and use your hands to bring the mixture together. This should be very easy and should be done in around 20 seconds - don't knead too much or let it get hot; just combine.

Divide the dough into 3 equal lumps and roll each into a long sausage. Put the sausage on a baking tray or plate and once all the dough is rolled, put these in the fridge to chill for at least 30 minutes.

You will see from my picture I made the recipe twice so I have 6 sausages - you will have 3.

Once chilled, remove from the fridge and using a very sharp knife, slice each sausage into discs. I aim to get 30 discs or so from each sausage. Lay the discs onto some greaseproof paper on a baking tray and oven cook for around 12-14 minutes. Keep an eye on them though, sometimes they need longer, sometimes less. Just remove them before they burn!! They will be fairly soft when they're still hot so leave them to cool for a minute or two on the tray before moving them onto a wire cooling rack.

If you want to make, say half plain and half flavoured biscuits without making two separate doughs it's still easy. Once the discs are on the tray ready to go into the oven, simply sprinkle with your flavouring of choice - I'm using some paprika on mine for the lovely colour :)