When it's rainy and grey in London cookies, preferably pretty homemade ones, always cheer me up. These ones have a lovely combination of flavour and textures - sweet and creamy white chocolate, crunchy pistachio and chewy apricot. This recipe makes quite a big batch of about 36 cookies so you might want to keep half a batch in dough form chilling in the fridge ready to bake on the next rainy day. Try swapping out pistachios for walnuts, white chocolate for dark and so on too.
INGREDIENTS
For the cookies:
450g plain flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
225g unsalted butter
225g caster sugar
1 large egg, lightly beaten
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
150g dried apricots, roughly chopped
150g pistachios, roughly chopped
To decorate:
200g white chocolate
50g pistachios, roughly chopped
Makes about 36.
METHOD
1. Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt into a large bowl
and set aside.
2. Beat the butter and sugar with an electric mixer until
pale and fluffy (about 4 minutes).
3. Gradually add the egg, vanilla, apricots and pistachios
and then the flour mixture until combined.
4. Shape the dough into 2 disks, cover in cling film and
chill in the fridge for 1 hour.
5. Roll out each disk in between 2 bits of greaseproof paper
to about 1cm thick and chill in the fridge again for 30mins (this gives you
nice clean shapes when you cut out the dough).
6. Preheat your oven to 170C.
7. Cut into whatever shapes you fancy, I used a 5cm round
cookie cutter but would love to try stars or hearts like these ones next.
8. Place on a lined baking tray and bake for 15 mins or
until firm at the edges and then let them cool completely on a wire rack – you want
a nice chewy texture so try not to let them go brown (like some of mine did...) as cookies keep cooking
for a few minutes once you’ve removed them from the oven.
9. Melt the white chocolate in a deep bowl (I prefer to use
a microwave for this in 30 second blasts to prevent burning the chocolate)
10. Peel the cooled cookies off of their greaseproof paper
lining and dip into the chocolate. Place on your wire rack to set (and let the
excess chocolate drip off) and top with the chopped pistachios.
4 comments:
These sound lovely, and they look so pretty too!
Love the two-toned effect!
Because I really like your blog, I nominated you for the ‘One Lovely Blog Award’. You can see it here: http://shoreditchbakes.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/rain-stops-play-but-not-the-awards-2/
Carolx
I thought I had lost this recipe for ever!!! Thank you so much!
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