Empire Biscuits

A wet afternoon in February. The kind where the light gives up by three and the only sensible thing to do is put the kettle on. This is when empire biscuits make sense to me, not in summer when the garden is generous, but in the quiet, cold months when a tin of something sweet on the counter feels like a small kindness to your future self.

They have a strange, particular history, these biscuits. They were called something else once, before the first war made the old name uncomfortable, and the bakeries of Scotland renamed them and carried on. I find that quietly moving. A biscuit that changed its name and kept being a biscuit. There's a lesson in that somewhere, but I'm not going to chase it.

What matters is the eating. A proper empire biscuit is two rounds of buttery shortbread, pale as parchment, sandwiching a generous layer of raspberry jam, topped with a thin shell of white icing and a single glace cherry pressed into the middle. The cherry is non-negotiable. I know glace cherries are unfashionable, that they belong to a different era of baking, that some people consider them embarrassing. I don't. They're the whole point. Without the cherry, you've just made a biscuit. With it, you've made an empire biscuit, and the difference is everything.

Make them on a slow afternoon when you have nothing else to do. Let the dough rest properly. Bake them pale. Use a jam with whole fruit in it, the kind where you can still see the seeds. I wrote it down in the notebook the last time I made a batch: shortbread, jam, icing, cherry, rain outside, the radio on. Some afternoons are worth the writing down.