White chocolate dipped pistachio and apricot cookies

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.

Adapted from Martha Stewart’s basic butter cookie dough.