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.

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.