1. Line two baking trays with baking parchment.

2. Put the butter and sugar in a food mixer (or use a large bowl and a hand-held electric whisk). Cream until fluffy, then add the flour, salt, ground almonds and zest. Wrap in cling film and chill for 30 minutes.

3. Preheat the oven to 180°C/fan 160°C/350°F/gas mark 4.

4. On a lightly floured work top, roll out the dough to 4mm thick. Cut out circles: I used 8cm wide fluted cutter and a smaller 4cm circle cutter. Place the larger on one tray, the smaller on another, re-rolling until the dough is used. You should have 20 of each size. At this point, you can freeze the cut-out biscuits.

5. Bake in the preheated: the smaller biscuits take 9-10 minutes and the larger 15-18 minutes. Cool for a few minutes on the trays, then remove to wire racks to cool completely. You can bake the biscuits a day or two ahead and store in an airtight container.

6. To make the icing, put the icing sugar in a bowl. Slowly still in the lemon juice until you have a fairly stiff paste that will spread over the bonnets without pouring over the edges into a mess (using fondant icing sugar will prevent this). If needed, the icing can be thickened with more icing sugar or thinned out with water.

7. Divide between two bowls and stir enough yellow food colour into one to make pale yellow icing, leaving the other white. cover each with cling film.

8. Take five larger biscuits, and place on a work top. Spread a small amount of white icing into the centre and top with a small biscuit (this is the crown of the bonnet).

9. Spoon over some white icing and gently spread to the edge using a small blunt knife. Decorate straight away with sugar flowers and ribbons, sticking them to the still tacky icing. Repeat. Do the same with the second half of the biscuits and the yellow icing, until all the bonnets have been decorated and half are white and half are yellow. Leave to set.

This recipe was taken from Seasonal Baking. Photography by Dan Jones.