Freckle Face Biscuit Christmas Wreath

1. Find a flat plate, board or cake board at least 28cm across. A rimmed platter fights you when you try to lift a piece out later.
2. Lay the biscuits in a ring on it, alternating the pink ones and the smartie ones, each overlapping the last by about a third. This is the dry run.
3. Look at it, adjust the spacing so the two ends meet cleanly, then lift the biscuits off in order and stack them beside the plate in that order.
4. Melt the white chocolate in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water, and take it off the heat while a few lumps are still visible. Stir those out in the residual warmth. White chocolate seizes if it gets hot, and there is no rescuing it.
5. If you are using the icing instead, stir the lemon juice into the icing sugar and add cold water a few drops at a time until it is thick enough to hold a peak.
6. Put a teaspoon of chocolate on the plate where the first biscuit sits, press the biscuit down, and hold it for five seconds.
7. Work around the ring, putting the chocolate where each biscuit will overlap the one before it rather than in the middle of the biscuit, so nothing squeezes out where it can be seen.
8. Set the giant speckle in the centre of the ring, or snap it in half and lean the two halves together at the top where a bow would sit.
9. Scatter the sprinkles over while the chocolate is still wet, from a height, so they land in the joins as well as on the biscuits.
10. Leave it on the bench for an hour to set. Not the fridge: a cold wreath sweats when it comes back out and the icing goes tacky and dull.
11. Tie the ribbon into a bow and lay it at the top once everything is firm.

Doing it with children

Split it in two. The melting is adult work and takes four minutes. Everything else, the dry run, the pattern, the pressing down, the sprinkles and the bow, is theirs, and the dry run is the part that keeps a small child busy while the chocolate is on the stove. Give each child their own section of the ring rather than letting two of them work into the same gap.

If the plan is a whole afternoon rather than twenty minutes, our stained glass Christmas biscuits are the oven version, with dough to chill, shapes to cut and lollies to crush. Build the wreath first while everyone is still patient, and bake second.

Common questions

How do I get the biscuits to stick together?

Melted white chocolate, applied at the overlap and held for five seconds. It sets hard and it holds a vertical join, which matters if you want to hang the wreath rather than lay it flat. A thick icing sugar paste works too and takes longer to firm up. What does not work is jam, honey or anything that stays soft: the ring slides apart the moment the plate is tilted.

How far ahead can I build a biscuit wreath?

The day before, and keep it on the bench under a loose tea towel rather than in the fridge or a sealed container. Biscuits soften when they are shut in with their own moisture, and refrigeration is worse. Add the ribbon on the day so it stays crisp.

Can children make this without an oven?

That is the whole idea. The only heat involved is melting 150g of white chocolate, and the icing sugar version removes even that. There is no dough, no chilling, no rolling and nothing sharp.

What it is actually for

A wreath is a centrepiece that gets eaten, which makes it useful on a table that already has too much on it. It also travels to a school break up better than a plate of loose biscuits, because everything is stuck down. The rest of the range sits on the Jen's Biscuits page, our guide to Australian biscuits and biscuit tins covers which ones are worth giving as they come, and children's Christmas food handles the rest of that table.

Jen's Freckle Face is $9.95 for 300g and sits with the rest of our biscuits, beside the confectionery and the family Christmas gifts. Shipping is free Australia-wide on orders over $100. Orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched the same day from our Corio, VIC warehouse, tracked with Australia Post.