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.

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.