Cookies Weekend

It was a cookie-baking weekend. It wasn't planned, just happened that the mood and the flow was just there! Well, I guess for cookies, you can still bake and keep it till Chinese New Year (CNY). Therefore, it wasn't considered too early too!

The cookies which I baked, weren't the usual recipes which I normally used. Why? Because I wanted to try new cookies and new recipes. Frankly, if you ask me, I'm not a great fan of cookies, except Subway's soft and chewy cookies. Even so, how many can you eat?

Anyway, back to my cookies baking spree. In one and half day, I baked four types of cookies - Peanut Cookies, Pineapple Tarts, Chocolate Chips Cookies and Rose Cookies.

Pineapple tarts were baked using a friend's recipe, which is not convenient for me to share the recipe. However, I do find that there are a lot of very good recipes which anyone can use. Like A Baker's Videoblog, The Little Teochew and from Kitchen Capers Forum and many more! The reason why I still stick to my current recipe is because it only has three ingredients and is able to create the melt-in-the-mouth taste. Also, I knew that many people who made pineapple tarts swear by their SCS salted butter, and so do I. I only use SCS salted butter for making pineapple tart pastry, if not, it won't be found in my chiller!

In order to expedite my baking process, I usually roll up the pineapple paste first and keep them in the fridge. I also made the pastry the day before and stored them in the fridge. So that when I'm ready to bake, I can just take them out from the fridge, mould them and baked. It really saved me a lot of time by doing so. The enclosed pineapple tarts which I made, consist of very little pineapple paste, and lots of pastry, just the way myself and my family members like it!

It was the first time I tried Peanut cookies. This was using Wendy's recipe. However, after mixing, my dough was very unmanageable. Therefore, it was very very difficult to mould. It took me more than 2 hours to mould and bake them! Gosh! I think it was my mis-calculation of the ingredients since I reduced the quatities. It was supposed to be "melt in the mouth", mine was crispy and crunchy (due to my kneading and kneading). However, the comments given was good too! At least my siblings like the fragrance of the peanut!

The first time I tried Bakertan's Chocolate chip cookies, I like it very much. I had wanted to try his recipe since then, but I didn't have the time to bake them. So this time, I decided to bake it as part of the CNY cookies. As I didn't want to wait for the dough to harden, I dropped the very very soft and creamy dough onto the tray immediately. There were two batches which I baked. For the first batch, I baked it immediately when the tray was full. For the second batch, I placed the tray into the chiller while waiting for the first batch to be baked.

The conclusion was, the batch which was baked from the chiller spreaded less. Nevertheless, they are equally good. My siblings loved this chocolate chip cookies. They said it tasted exactly like Famous Amos cookies sans the aroma! They were snacking on this cookies non-stop! I was glad they loved it too!

Finally, the very last cookies I baked was the Rose Cookies from Gina's blog. I recalled trying some rose cookies last year, which was really nice with melt-in-the-mouth texture. However, I knew this recipe wouldn't have that kind of texture. Since I still have my Rose Water and some roses, I decided to try this cookies.

I didn't follow the instructions completely. Instead of melting the butter, I creamed the butter with sugar instead. The dough was really easy to handle. I was able to mould it round nicely. Even though SRF was used, the shape didn't change much. It only become firmer after baking, with very little increase in size. The cookies were really fragrant, crispy and crunchy!

After trying out so many different cookie recipes, I had a feel of the various dough texture. Even though the texture were different, they all churned out fragrant crispy and crunchy cookies. Somehow, I enjoyed baking these cookies after I received positive feedback from my family.

Recipe for Rose Cookies, with slight modification from Taste of Time.
(Makes about 170 one-inch cookies)

Ingredients
250g Salted butter, room temp
400g Self Raising Flour, sift
150g Icing sugar, sift
4 tsp Rose water (I used 5 tsp, which I think can be reduced to 4)
10g Dried mini rose buds

Method
1. Remove leaves, stalks from rose buds, peel and separate rose petals.
2. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
3. Add rose water, mix well.
4. Add in flour, followed by rose petals and mix till it forms a smooth dough.
5. Mould the dough into rounds place on a baking tray.
6. Bake in preheated oven 180C for 15 mins.
7. Remove to cool before storing.

I'm submitting this Rose Cookies to the Aspiring Bakers #3: My Favorite CNY Cookie (Jan 2011) hosted by Jess.