It's almost Christmas time, and this year I've got an idea. I have a four (maybe five) part special planned on biscuit recipes to make for that someone in your life with a sweet tooth! Why biscuits? Well, they're the perfect bakes to give as presents, they're relatively easy to make, you don't have to worry about getting a perfect rise, you can make them ahead of time and they won't go bad (or you can freeze the dough and bake the cookies when the day comes) and they're fuss-free to package.
The first part of this Christmas special involves a recipe that's maybe a little bit kitsch, but hey, what's Christmas if not kitsch-y, eh?
These are chocolate and vanilla candy-cane cookies. You can of course, replace the chocolate bit with peppermint flavouring and red food gel colouring to get a traditional candy cane colour, but I personally am not a fan of peppermint in cookies, so I went with chocolate instead. The only problem with incorporating cocoa into a biscuit recipe is that it changes the consistency of the dough quite a bit. I was going for an intense cocoa flavour, so I put half a cup of unsweetened cocoa powder to 1 cup of all purpose flour, which was a big mistake. The chocolate cookie dough came out a bit too crumbly without the extra gluten in the flour to hold it together, so I've revised the ratio to about 1:5 cocoa powder to flour. That should work better in keeping the dough from crumbling when you're twisting it around.
Ingredients
- 1 egg
- 1.5 cups all purpose flour (or type 405 Weizenmehl in Germany) (for the white parts)
- 1.25 cups all purpose flour (for the chocolate parts)
- 0.25 cups unsweetened cocoa powder
- 0.5 tsp salt
- 1 pack vanilla sugar (or 1 tsp vanilla extract/flavouring)
- 1 cup butter, softened
- 1 cup powdered sugar
Method
- Cream powdered sugar and butter together until pale and fluffy.
- Add egg, vanilla sugar and salt and mix until incorporated.
- Divide batter into two.
- Add flour to one batter, and flour/cocoa powder mix to the other batter.
- Mix both until smooth cookie dough is formed. (I recommend using your hands for this bit)
- Wrap with cling wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour or more.
- Once ready to bake, preheat oven to 190 degrees Celsius.
- Take walnut sized amount of both white and chocolate parts, roll each into a long strings, pinch ends together and then twist together to form pattern of the candy cane.
- Continue until all batter is used up.
- Bake for 10-12 minutes, then leave to cool completely.
Et voila! After you're done with the cookies, you can package them in little plastic bags and tie them up with a nice ribbon, as seen below, and give them to friends, relatives, hey, maybe even make amends this holiday and give them to your enemies. This package below is for a friend, but I've kept a few extras for an extra special present that will be featured at the end of this Christmas series, so stay tuned for updates!
