9 Jul 17 (Sun) - Butter Cookies

Itching to bake something but tired of baking butter cakes so googled for ideas and decided to bake some cookies. Didn't have any experience in baking cookies before so googled for a basic cookie recipes. Found this butter cookies recipe by Nasi Lemak Lover that looked easy enough. Got down to it and as I went along, the process got messy because when I mixed the butter and icing sugar using a hand-held mixer, some of the icing sugar flew out. And when I added the flour to the mixture, it got even messier because some of the flour and bits of the butter mixture flew out. Made some modifications to the basic recipe by adding chopped dried cranberries and ground Brazilian nuts. Mixing the ingredients was not the worse part. Attempted to use cling wrap to create a pipping bag and using the icing nozzle to pipe the soft dough onto the baking tray and the cling wrap gave way because I was squeezing too hard for the dough to come out of the nozzle. In the end, I had to use my hands to roll the dough into small balls and flattened them on the baking tray. The dough was supposed to make about 30 pieces of cookies but I ended up with 50 pieces. Must be due to my poor estimation of the size per cookie. 

Once I was finished with all the dough, I quickly put the tray into the preheated oven and set it to bake for 13 minutes. Soon the time was up, some of the cookies didn't seem to be brown enough so I added another two minutes. Bad decision because those that were golden brown earlier were now of darker shade. The cookies smelled nice, however, those that were of darker brown tasted a bit bitter because I had over baked them. Should have just stopped at 13 minutes and left them in the oven to brown slowly. So a rather crude attempt at baking butter cookies.

Butter Cookies (adapted from Nasi Lemak Lover)

Ingredients:

100g butter, soften

30g icing sugar

90g plain flour

30g corn flour

1.5 tbsp dried cranberries, roughly chopped

2 heaped tsp ground Brazilian nuts

Method:

1.  Pre-heat the oven to 180 degree celsius

2.  Beat butter and icing sugar till creamy.

3.  Sift plain flour and corn flour together.

4.  Add the flour mixture into the butter mixture and mix well to a soft dough

5.  Add cranberries and ground brazilian nuts to the mixture and mix well

6.  Take some dough, roll into a ball and flatten onto baking tray (size about 50 cents coin)

7.  Repeat step 6 until the dough is finished

8.  Bake for 13 minutes or until golden brown