Organise a tea party this summer and bake some of our delicious recipes to impress your guests. Have a fun afternoon with your friends and spend some time telling them about GAIN and the work our charity does to raise awareness of Guillain-Barré syndrome, CIDP and the associated inflammatory neuropathies.
Here’s a lovely simple biscuit recipe you can get the kids to bake. Why not order some of our cookie cutters to cut the biscuits into fun shapes? You can make these a couple of days in advance so there’s plenty of time to clean up the mess the kids make in the kitchen before your guests arrive!
Ingredients
200g unsalted soft butter
200g golden caster sugar
1 large egg
½ tsp vanilla extract
400g plain flour
Method
- Preheat oven to 200 C (180 C fan)/ gas mark 6 and line a baking tray with baking paper. Put the butter in a bowl and beat it with an electric hand whisk until it’s soft and creamy. Add the sugar, then the egg and vanilla extract and mix. Finally, add the flour to make a dough. If the dough feels sticky, add a bit more flour and knead it in.
- Roll out the dough on a floured surface to a thickness of about ½ cm. Cut out shapes using GAIN cookie cutters or cutters of your own. If you don’t have any cutters, an upturned cup will do. Re-roll the offcuts and repeat until all the dough has gone.
- Put the biscuits on the baking tray and bake in the oven for 8 to 10 minutes or until the edges are just brown. Be careful not to overcook so they don’t go too hard. Leave to cool. The biscuits will keep for 3 days if you store them in a tin.
You can vary the recipe by adding different ingredients such as chocolate chips or lemon zest. You can also decorate the biscuits with icing, sweets and sprinkles.
More fun(d) raising ideas
Put on some activities at your summer tea party and have some fun with your guests, whether they’re small children or grown ups who are big kids at heart! Here are a couple of ideas from us that could help get the donations flowing in.
Biscuit decorating – ask guests to pay for a plain biscuit which they can then decorate in their choice of colours and toppings. Provide a supply of different coloured and flavoured icing, sprinkles and sweets and leave them to do the rest. You could even have a competition to judge the best decorated biscuit.
Name the tortoise (or other soft toy) – guests pay to name a furry tortoise or other cuddly toy. You can either do this by having a board with a set of pre-selected names from which they choose or giving them free choice and then pulling the winner out of a hat. Either way, the winner gets to keep the toy.
