Skip to main content

Gem of an Idea

I spotted organic raw sugar on my supermarket counter the other day, and picked it up thinking it will come handy in baking. Or more specifically, baking cookies, which has become a weekend ritual!

Started by mixing 100 gms of butter with 40 gms caster sugar and 30 gms raw sugar, and beat them until light. Then added 175 gms flour and ½ tsp vanilla essence and mixed everything into a smooth dough. Rolled it into a log, then left it wrapped in a buttered sheet in the fridge for half an hour.

By this time, the dough is a bit harder and easy to cut into thin cookies. My raw sugar is not very fine, so the cookies were speckled with brown. To give it extra color, I added Gems in the center of all cookies. If you don’t have Gems handy, use M&M.

I baked the cookies at 180C for 15 minutes, and they came out looking nice and brown. What a difference from the pale yellow cookies I’ve been baking past two weeks.



This recipe makes about 24 cookies, and my small oven can’t take more than 12 at a time. So I baked 12 yesterday and left half the dough in the fridge until today. The next batch, baked a day later, came out tasting great so the dough keeps well for a day. And the cookies keep for at least 3-4 days if left in an airtight container.
Labels:

Comments

Aparna Balasubramanian said…
These cookies look cute. I have tried making cookies with gems by incorporating them in the dough. My daughter loves them.
Saw your link from Joanna's blog.
March 17, 2008 at 4:04 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Announcing AWED : Britain

Before I ate my first Italian wood fired pizza, before I went to that swanky Japanese sushi bar for the first time, or the neighborhood Chinese joint, the first non-Indian cuisine I encountered was British. Not real food, mind you, but the tempting, oh so delicious descriptions in my favorite novels. From Enid Blyton to Jane Austen to P.G. Wodehouse, every favorite character in every favorite novel seems to have food on their mind. Yes, British food gets ridiculed a lot. But forget their main course dishes for now, and think of the full English breakfast and the elegant afternoon teas. Then try imagining the world without cucumber sandwiches or potato chips and you will realize you can't do without British food. Which is why when I saw that DK was looking for hosts for her monthly event AWED (A Worldly Epicurean's Delight) and there has never been a British AWED, I promptly signed up. The rules are simple really: Make any vegetarian or vegan British dish (eggs are
25 comments
Read more

Mystery Fruit

This only happened a few times every year, just when the rainy season kicked in. A street hawker will come by, straw basket on head. He will yell "kaul chapni" and I will run out to buy a bundle of these. Stuck together like flowers, they looked like a bouquet. Every hole contains a little fruit. You break out the package, peel the tiny fruit that pops out and eat it. Done slowly, it can take you an hour to eat an head. Or did, when I was about 12 years old. That was the last time I saw this fruit. I've never seen it again, didn't even know what it was called or where it came from. Three weeks back, Vikram Doctor wrote about a store in Khar that sells Sindhi foods. He described this fruit and I knew it came from my vivid childhood memories. And finally, I knew we were talking about lotus fruit. Now talk about coincidences. Last weekend, I was passing by a lane in Bandra and for the first time in many, many years I saw the straw basket filled with my mytery fru
14 comments
Read more

Of Brun and Bun Maska

There is more to Bombay's breads than the pao that goes into pao bhaji and vada pao. There's Brun. and there's bun. We will get there. First, you have to get to know the city's Parsis. And Iranis, who are also Zoroastrians, but came to city a little later, in the late 19th or early 20th century. And when they came, they brought with them these little cafes that dot the city. I am no expert on Irani chai cafes. And I can't tell you whether Yazdani Bakery will provide you the best experience or Kyani's. But I can tell you a few things you need to ignore when you get there. Appearances don't matter; so ignore the fact that the marble/glass top tables and the wooden chairs look a bit dilapidated. Also ignore the rundown look the place sports. Instead, get yourself settled. And order a bun muska. This one's familiar to you as a first cousin of the soft hamburger bun. It's similar, but just a tad bit sweeter. Maska, of course, is the generous dollop o
13 comments
Read more