When i went to UK last week, i couldn’t help but dropped by Jane Asher’s cake shop in Chelsea. I was pleased to see they had coconut essence - and then bought two bottles - and found a set of lovely snowflakes cookie cutters.
I couldn’t wait to go home and try them.
I wanted a recipe for cut-out cookies so that they don’t spread out and ruin the beautiful snowflake look. I found this one, from Donna Hay’s “Gourmandises”. The cookies were called “biscuit de noël à la vanille” (ie vanilla xmas bicuits). They were heart shapped and covered with icing sugar and looked great.

Biscuits de Noël à la vanille

This makes far enough biscuits, i can tell you. Actually, i’m very disapointed with this recipe : the dough tasted so good, but the cooked biscuits were far to hard to bite and were to neutral in taste. I presume they must be made not to be eaten, but to be hold by the Christmas tree.
Anyway, i found that covering them with royal icing and reducing the oven down to 150°C made them more edible and found myself eating one of what i called , just a minute ago, an “awful biscuit”.
I used 1/2 tsp coconut essence instead of the vanilla essence given below as i wanted to try using my fresh-buy.

185g soft butter
225g caster sugar
1 1/2 tsp vanilla essence
350g flour
1 egg + 1 egg yolk

1 egg white
250g icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla essence. Add the flour, and the eggs and knead until you’ve got a smooth dough. Cover with cling film and refrigirate for at least 30 minutes.
Roll to a 5mm thickness and cut out shapes.
Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, or until just brown.

Posted by fanny who loves to forget labeling posts