Moreish biscuits go amazingly well with a cup of coffee or tea, but they’re even sweeter in heart-shaped form and filled with custard cream.

“They are not hard to make and fabulous to eat,” Nigella Lawson promised. Plus, they’re “heavenly”, she added.

Adding to the cuteness is the little dents lined around the heart-based biscuit, which Nigella Lawson’s achieves with heart cutters and a corn on the cob holder.

“This is my patented tool for making the dotted perforations like quaint stitching around the edges of each heart,” she said of the corn on the cob holder.

Here’s how to make Nigella Lawson’s homemade custard cream heart biscuits.

Custard cream heart biscuits

Makes: 14 biscuits

Ingredients

For the biscuits:

• 175g plain flour
• Three tablespoons of Bird’s original custard powder
• One teaspoon baking powder
• 50g unsalted butter
• 50g vegetable shortening (such as Trex)
• Three tablespoons caster sugar
• One large egg
• One tablespoon of milk or more to bind

For the custard cream:

• One tablespoon of Bird’s original custard powder
• 100g icing sugar
• 50g soft unsalted butter
• One teaspoon boiling water

Method

Preheat the oven to 180C (160C fan/gas mark four).

To make the biscuits

Put the flour, custard powder and baking powder into a processor and pulse to mix.

Add the butter, cut into cubes and the vegetable shortening, in mounded teaspoonfuls, and pulse to cut into the flour to create a crumbly mixture.

Tip in the sugar and pulse again, and then beat the egg and tablespoon of milk together. Pour down the funnel of the processor with the engine running until it clumps together into a ball.

Form the dough into a ball, press down into a fat disc, then wrap in clingwrap, and let it rest in the fridge for 20 minutes.

Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to a thickness of 4mm. Dip a 5cm heart-shaped cutter in flour and then cut out your shapes.

Prick the outside edge of each heart all the way around on one side with a corn on the cob holder (or another pointed instrument).

Cook on a lined baking sheet for 15 minutes, and then let the biscuits cool on a rack before sandwiching them.

To make the custard cream

Put the custard powder and icing sugar into the processor and pulse briefly to combine and delump. Add the butter, and blitz together until you get a smooth cream. Add the teaspoon of boiling water and pulse again.

Sandwich each biscuit with about one teaspoon of custard cream, by gently spreading a layer of the cream over the unpricked side of a biscuit and then wiggling a matching top on to it.