Challenge:
Viji gave us the recipes of four amazing cookies and we were supposed to choose one or more from them and try our hands at that.As usual few modifications were allowed as long as we were intact with the key recipe.We had to choose from
1.Strawberry nutella thumbprint cookies
2.Peanut butter cookies
3.pinwheel/checker board cookies
4.Short bread sandwich cookies
What I did:
I chose the starwberry nutella thumbprint cookies which were already egg-less and made my life easy :)The major change I made to the recipe was to use store bought strawberry syrup as I wasnt able to find fresh strawberries :( and halved the quantity of the original recipe. For the rest I simply followed the recipe Viji gave.
Here is how I made it
Ingredients:
3/4 cup all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
Salt – A pinch
2 table spoon unsalted butter
4 tablespoon sugar
1/2 vanilla bean scrapped
3 tablespoon strawberry syrup
Nutella for filling
Method:
1.Sift the baking powder,salt with all purpose flour and keep aside.
2.In a large mixing bowl,cream the softned buuter with sugar,add the strawberry syrup,scraped vanilla and whisk well using an egg beater.
3.Now gently fold the dry ingredients to the wet mixture and bring together and form a dough.
4.At this point the dough should be very soft and sticky.Refrigrate for 1 hour.
5.Preheat the oven at 175C.Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or dust your baking tray with little flour.
6.Make small even sized balls out of refrigrated dough,flatten it slightly and arrange in the baking sheet.Now make small thumb prints in the center of cookies.Bake in the preheated oven for 10 minutes.
7.Remove from oven and let them cool.Fill in nutella in the thumb prints and delicious cookies are ready to be served
Time:10+10 minutes
Yield:20 small cookies
Lessons learnt:
1.I should have reduced the amount of strawberry syrup as I was using the artificial concentrate.This was very dark and my cookies turned out to be in a different colour, nevertheless they were tasty.
2.I should have kneaded the dough for few more minutes,this would have avoided the cracks.This tip was suggested by the fellow bakers on Facebook page.
Notes:
1.You can use some other filling instead of nutella.I think a simple butter cream icing or any jam that would complement strawberry will be yummy.
2.As it is mentioned in Viji's source recipe,do not bake it beyond 12 minutes.For me 10 minutes was perfect,cookies started turning stiff and crispy as they cooled down
Check here for amazing cookies from fellow bakers :)
