Instructions

1. To make the biscuits, combine butter, sugar, vanilla and salt in a medium sized bowl and beat with an electric mixer until creamed together. Add the flour and use your hands to combine and knead into a soft dough.
2. Form dough into a thick disc and wrap with clingfilm. Refrigerate for 15-20 minutes.
3. While chilling, pre-heat oven to 150°C/130°C Fan/gas 2 and line 2-3 trays with parchment paper.
4. After chilling, roll dough out on a well floured surface to about 5mm thick, the dough is similar to shortbread so may be a bit crumbly around the edges. Depending on how many sized stars you have, cut out between 3-4 of each sized star. Re-roll scraps and continue cutting out stars until the dough is used up. Arrange larger sized stars together on a prepared baking tray, and smaller sized ones together on another, then place in the fridge for 15 minutes or in the freezer for 5 minutes.
5. Once chilled, bake in pre-heated oven for 12 minutes for smaller biscuits and up to 14 minutes for larger ones. Don’t let biscuits get darker than a light golden colour around the edges.
6. Leave biscuits to cool on trays for 5 minutes before removing from trays and leaving to cool completely on a wire rack.
7. For the icing, combine icing sugar, milk, glucose syrup and flavouring of choice in a medium sized bowl. Mix together until completely smooth.
8. Remove a small bit of mixed icing, about 2-3 tbsp, and colour it yellow. With the larger amount, colour it green.
9. To decorate the cookies, line a few trays with parchment paper. Divide the cookies into either enough to make 1 tall tree (about 22 cookies in total, of about 4 of each size) or 2 smaller trees (between 14 – 18 cookies each, 2-3 of each size). There will be extra cookies, these are good to have in case any break, or you get peckish!
10. Dip biscuits, top side down, into the green icing. Allow excess icing to drip off and place biscuits on parchment paper lined tray, icing side up. Dip the smallest sized star cookie in the yellow icing, which will top the tree. Do more if you’re making more than one tree. Cover the leftover green icing with clingfilm or seal container with a lid.
11. Decorate biscuits with sprinkles, coloured sugar etc. while the icing is still a bit wet. Once decorated, leave biscuits to dry completely, about an hour.
12. To assemble, spoon a bit of the leftover green icing on the centre of one of the largest star cookies, then gently stick another star on top of it, making sure the points of the top star is positioned in the spaces of the bottom star cookie. Repeat this, working your way from largest to smallest cookie to form the tree. Lastly, glue the yellow star cookie to the top of the tree with a bit of green icing. Leave to dry somewhere safe from being bumped over for about an hour.
13. Biscuit trees will keep well for up to a month in an airtight container, but only for about 2 weeks if left out in the open.
14. You can choose to use royal icing to decorate the cookies instead, but royal icing does contain egg.