Cinnamon Biscuits

My new favourite biscuits - I've been making these regularly and the recipe is definitely a keeper. I tried it with melted butter and with a combination of butter and sunflower oil, but surprisingly, these are better with vegetable oil, IMHO.

Ingredients:

• 1 egg
• 60 g oil
• 75 g sugar
• 220 g flour
• 5 g baking powder
• pinch of salt 
• spices

Preparation:

Lightly beat the egg with the sugar, add the oil and the spices. I make my own mix of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and aniseed and add about a teaspoon of that, but you can add as much or as little to taste. Mix in the flour with the baking powder and form a pliable, but not sticky dough. Separate the dough into twenty small balls and press each ball between your palms to form a cookie. You can put aside a tablespoon of the sugar and press each cookie into the sugar, to sugarcoat it. You can also improvise some design on top of the cookies, as I did with the help of a fork.

Bake in a warm oven at 180C until the cookies turn lightly brown. Serve cooled with coffee or tee.

I had an idea to use the same dough to make a pie crust, so I made a blackberry custard pie. It was really delicious and the dough is perfect for pie crust, but the cinnamon taste was a bit overwhelming, so probably vanilla or no spices next time.

Coconut Biscuits

I can't claim, that these are the perfect coconut biscuits, but they are pretty close, if that ideal biscuit exists at all. I came up with the recipe last night on a whim and the first batch were by midday today polished, so I made another batch, with a few improvements.

Ingredients: 

• 40 g coconut oil
• 60 g sugar
• 20 g coconut shreddings
• 1 egg
• 100 g flour
• 5 g baking powder
• 1 lemon zest
  

Preparation:

There  isn't really much to it - melt the coconut oil, add the sugar, the shredded coconut, the lemon zest, the egg, the flour and the baking powder. The resulting batter is sticky, but because of the high content of oil, very easy to form into small balls. Place them on a baking tray, leaving enough space between each ball and bake for 25 min in a preheated oven at 180C.

The resulting biscuits are flat, very crunchy, aromatic, not too sweet. They can be eaten as they are or as a biscuit sandwich with jam in between. I find them perfect for coffee, but they go well as a desert with a glass of desert wine as well :)

Honey Biscuits

A recipe with sourdough discard I tried today and liked. It is a variation of a recipe I read in a cooking blog, which I adapted to my products. It yielded 30 small size biscuits, which go just perfect with my coffee and Duolingo lessons :)

I've experimented with adding sourdough discard into various muffins and cakes and the results are not always satisfying - what we are actually adding is basically flour and water in equal proportions and, dependent on the quantity of the added sourdough, it might change the taste of the final product, not always in a positive way. But these came out so delicious, that my husband called them fentanyl in the form of a cookie :) 

Ingredients:

• 70 g discard sourdough
• 1 egg
• 2 tbsp honey
• 100 g sugar
• 8 g (one pack) vanilla sugar
• 
  1 tsp cinnamon
• 40 g vegetable oil
• 250 g flour
• 5 g baking powder
• pinch of salt
  

Preparation: 

Mix the sourdough with the egg and the oil. Add the honey, sugar and spices into the mixture. Finally add the sifted flour with the baking powder and knead into dough. Place the dough in the fridge for 30 min to rest. 

After 30  min, turn on the oven at 180C. Take the dough out of the fridge, cover a baking tin with baking paper and prepare the cookies, taking small pieces of the dough, forming them into smooth balls and slightly pressing them with your palm to flatten them. Bake for 15 min.

Serve with coffee or milk and enjoy.

Lemon Cookies

Everybody loves cookies, especially around Christmas. 

Well, my family are big sweets lovers and consume cookies all year round, but anyway ... :)

I absolutely adore lemons - lemon color, lemon trees, lemon smell, lemonade, so about a couple of months ago I came up  with an idea for butter cookies with lemon. As Alex tries hard to cut on sugar, these cookies have less sugar than usual, but are still very delicious and fragrant. I've tried to replace the white sugar with stevia partially and completely - partially works, completely - not so much, as stevia has a different taste, which I happen not to appreciate. I also recently tried to replace sugar with honey - nah, nobody liked them, though we eat lots of honey otherwise.

This last batch is prepared with brown sugar and it was declared one of the best so far, so here's the recipe:

Ingredients:

• 1 average size lemon - zest and juice
• 1 egg
• 80 g brown sugar 
• 80 g butter
• 200 g flour
• 5 g baking powder and a pinch of baking soda
  

Preparation:

Grate the lemon and then squeeze it. Add the sugar and stir. Add the butter and the egg, stir. Fold in the flour with the baking powder and the soda. The resulting dough is very soft and sticky, but do not add additional flour, as the cookies will get too hard. 

Bake in a preheated oven at 180C for about 20 min. This last batch came out just a little bit too soft, we prefer them slightly overbaked.

Serve with coffee, tea or why not a glass of white wine as a dessert after a light dinner.

Chocolate Leaves

The icy weather, which hit Europe these last 10 days, has been keeping us home, the children are enjoying extended Christmas holidays and I am knitting like crazy and baking. Yesterday I saw a tutorial on how to make chocolate leaves and I couldn't help it but try it today. It is such an original idea and so easy to make. All you need is chocolate and leaves.

As leaves are a bit scant right now, I used four yellowing leaves from my small home-grown lemon grove. To make chocolate leaves you melt the chocolate, cover the bottom side of the leaves with the melted chocolate using a small brush and leave them to cool in the fridge. Then you carefully peel the real leaf and you get a stunning chocolate leaf to be used for various decorations.

I made four test leaves

and used the rest of the melted chocolate to cover a few of the honey biscuits I had just baked.
The recipe for the biscuits, because husband loved them so much:
Ingredients:

• 150 g butter
• 100 g powdered sugar
• 2 egg yolks
• 300 g flour
• 1 tbsp honey
• cinnamon, ginger, ground nutmeg

Beat the butter with the sugar, add the yolks, the the flour, the honey and the spices and mix. Make small balls from the dough, flatten them slightly and place in a baking tin, covered with baking paper. Bake in a preheated oven at 180C.