These Garibaldi Biscuits are also sometimes called the flies graveyard for the way the dried fruit shows through the dough.

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Welcome back to the Great British Bake-Off (Baking Show) for 2022! It’s Biscuit Week and we’re making Garibaldi Biscuits, the technical bake for this episode.

Garibaldi Biscuits are made by wrapping thin almost shortcrust pastry around dried fruit. Then the dough is sliced into rectangles and baked until light golden brown and crispy. Perfect to serve with a cup of tea or a hot cup of fresh coffee.

Garibaldi biscuits with a cup of coffee.

This recipe is the Great British Baking Show Bake-Along bake for Biscuit Week. Remember biscuit in the UK doesn’t mean a soft flaky layered biscuit but rather a cookie!

Some of our favorite GBBO Biscuits from years past are these Florentines and these Spitzbuben. And of course, EVERYONE loved these Viennese Whirls.

2022 GBBO Biscuit Week Biscuits

Our choices for Biscuit Week included:

Signature Bake: Macarons (that look like anything but macarons)
Technical: Garibaldi Biscuits (with chocolate feathering)
Showstopper: Biscuit Mask (that MUST sit up on a stand)

We chose the Technical Bake for its easy, yet difficult bake. The recipe seems rather straightforward but once you get working on it you realize it’s harder than it looks.

Garibaldi Biscuit Tips

Just in the ability to keep the dough together while rolling it over dried fruit. It wants to tear. So you have to chill the dough well, work quickly, and don’t let the dried fruit tear the dough.

And don’t get me started on the soaked fruit inside. I think it could easily be spritzed with juice rather than soaked in boiling juice. The fruit never dried out after that soak. It was soaked through and through.

Plus the amount of fruit in Prue’s Garibaldi Biscuit recipe was a lot more than I could STUFF in these biscuits. Like so much more. I halved the amount used and it was still too much. I can’t believe they would ever dry out and get crispy if you added so much wet fruit.

I compromised in this version of the recipe with half the fruit and half the liquid and didn’t boil them together. I also used my homemade dried pitted cherries, use any fruit you like or have on hand.

Drying soaked fruit to put in garibaldi biscuits.

I skipped the chocolate feathering on these cookies. They don’t typically come with chocolate so I left it off. The other recipes you see online have cinnamon sugar on top. But I felt they were asking you to mimic the store-bought version and they don’t have cinnamon sugar on them. So I skipped that too.

About this recipe

This recipe has my personal changes to it. What I THINK worked best I put in the recipe. Use Prue’s if you want EXACTLY what everyone else used.

It calls for SELF-RAISING FLOUR which is not self-rising flour. To make self-raising flour to one cup of all-purpose flour add 2 tsp baking powder.

Garibaldi Biscuits

5 from 1 vote

These Garibaldi Biscuits are also sometimes called the flies graveyard for the way the dried fruit shows through the dough.

Course: Dessert Recipes

Cuisine: GBBO Inspired

Prep Time: 30

Cook Time: 13

Total Time: 43

Servings: cookies

Calories: 107kcal

Author: Laura

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Ingredients

1 cup dried fruit use currants, raisins, I used dried cherries
1/3 cup orange juice
1 cup self-raising flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup of cold butter
2 TBSP sugar
1 egg separated
1 TBSP water

Instructions

finely chop the dried fruit
gently warm the fruit and the juice to a simmer, remove from the heat, strain the fruit out and place on paper towels to drain
put the flour and salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse to combine
add the butter and process until it looks like crumbs
sprinkle in the sugar and pulse
add the egg yolk and the water and pulse again
pull the dough ball out and knead gently
divide in half and flatten into disks, wrap and chip for 15-20 minutes
meanwhile press the excess moisture out of the fruit as much as possible
preheat the oven to 350°
when the dough is chilled roll each disk into a 6×8 rectangle
brush one rectangle with egg white
sprinkle the dried fruit over the top of the egg white, place the other rectangle on top
roll the two together into a rectangle about 10×11
cut in half lengthwise and then cut into 6 pieces
brush with the egg white and bake for 12-13 minutes
the biscuits should be lightly browned
cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes and then place on a cooling rack to cool completely
separate if they are stuck together, I used scissors to gently cut the fruit between each biscuit