Spiced Christmas Cookies
Spiced Christmas Cookies flavoured with five Christmas spices, zests, treacle and dark muscovado sugar, made in 3 simple stages. So festive!
Servings: 18 cookies
Calories:
Follow at @ellasbetterbakes or tag #ellasbetterbakes!
Alter quantities (metric only) 18 cookies
Here's what you'll need...
- Medium heavy based saucepan
- Round cookie cutter or pint glass optional
Ingredients you'll need...
See blog post for suggested SUBSTITUTIONS if you do not have all of the ingredients listed below
Stage 1 - wet ingredients, melt together
- 200 g Dark Muscovado Sugar
- 150 g Honey
- 100 g Unsalted butter cut into chunks so that it melts quickly
- 1 tablespoon Dark treacle Tip - butter your tablespoon first, to ensure your treacle slides off it easily
Stage 2 - add to cooled wet ingredients
- 1 Large egg at room temperature and lightly beaten
- 1 teaspoon Lemon zest
- 1 teaspoon Orange zest
Stage 3 - dry ingredients, sift everything together except almonds
- 240 g Plain flour
- 1 tablespoon Cocoa powder
- 1 teaspoon Baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon Bicarbonate of soda
- ¼ teaspoon Fine salt
- 1½ teaspoon All Spice
- 1 teaspoon Ground ginger
- 1 teaspoon Cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon Ground cloves
- ½ teaspoon Nutmeg preferable freshly grated, otherwise use ground nutmeg
- 110 g Ground almonds
Here's what we do...
- Add your stage 1 wet ingredients to your heavy based medium sized saucepan and melt over a low heat whilst gently stirring just until the butter has melted and no lumps of sugar remain. Do not overheat, otherwise the mixture will be come heavy and tar like.
- Set aside to cool to room temperature. Stir every so often to ensure the mixture does not set.
- Meanwhile, sift all of your stage 2 ingredients together and set aside.
- To your cooled wet mixture, mix in your orange and lemon zest and then your beaten egg. Mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon until everything is incorporated.
- Next add your dry sifted ingredients and fold in.
- Then fold in your ground almonds. The mixture will be quite stiff.
- Cover and refrigerate for a couple of hours or overnight.
- Line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper.
- Weigh out 50 grams of the spiced cookie dough and flatten in the palm of your hand to a width of about 2.5 inches.
- Place your cookies on the baking sheet leaving a gap or around an inch and a half around them as they will spread when baking. You may have to bake them in two batches.
- Refrigerate the cookies again whilst your oven heats up.
- Heat your oven to 350°F/200°C/180°C fan/gas mark 4 and bake the cookies for 15 minutes. When ready they should be crackly on top.
- To give a uniform circular shape, use a large cookie cutter or a pint glass which is just a bit bigger than the baked cookies and, with the straight side down, put it over the cookie and spin it around a few times.
- Leave the spiced cookies to cool on the baking tray for 5-10 minutes (this also helps to set the cookie base) and then remove to a cooling rack.
- Once cool, decorate with icing made from sifted icing sugar and lemon juice or sift over some icing sugar.