Eat Christmas Cookies 3 - Mexican wedding cakes

Susan of Food Blogga is hosting Eat Christmas Cookies Season 3. It's easy to join in - all you have to do is bake Christmas cookies and follow the directions at the event link above to have your entry posted. You can check out the progressive Christmas cookie roundup here.

I have chosen to make a cookie that I have been curious about for a long time - Mexican wedding cakes, also known as Russian tea cakes. They are a nutty, buttery shortbread biscuit rolled in icing sugar, and look just like a snowy landscape.

I used this recipe found in the Epicure section of The Age.

The recipe is confusing in one respect in that it says to roll out the cookie dough to a 40cm piece. I initially thought this meant to roll it flat with a rolling pin - but it actually means to roll the dough into 40cm logs, like this:

You cut slices off the chilled logs to form the cookies:

which you roll in icing sugar while still warm after baking, then again once they have cooled down. Simple!

Head on over to Susan's site to see all the other great Christmas cookies - and we'd love to see yours too!

Eat Christmas Cookies - Spiced gingerbread

Susan of Food Blogga is hosting a once-off event to celebrate Christmas - Eat Christmas Cookies! The brief is simple - post about a Christmas cookie.

As part of my Christmas goodie boxes, I made spiced gingerbread prepared as hanging tree decorations, so thought these would be perfect for the Christmas cookie event. They are pictured at the bottom of this post.

These cookies are sooooooo cute and are fairly easy to make. They are fun to decorate (if you have the time!), and taste really good - they are not overwhelmingly spicy, nor are they hard and uninviting to eat, like gingerbread cookies can sometimes be.

The recipe is from one of the books in the Kitchen Classic series, Celebration, and is as follows:

140g softened butter
115g brown sugar
1/4 cup golden syrup
1 egg
2 cups plain flour
3 teaspoons ground ginger
3/4 teaspoon ground cloves
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

Grease 2 baking trays. Cream the butter and the sugar with an electric mixer, then beat in the syrup and the egg. Fold through the sifted flour, bicarbonate of soda and spices with a wooden spoon to form a biscuit dough. Knead the dough on a floured surface until smooth, divide into two and press into discs, wrap each disc in clingwrap then refrigerate for 25 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Remove the chilled dough from the fridge, and roll each disc of dough on a floured surface to a thickness of 4mm. Cut out shapes from the dough using Christmas cookie cutters. Place the biscuits on cookie sheets for baking, and if you wish to make them into tree decorations, use the small end of a round metal piping tip to cut a hole for ribbon in the top of each biscuit. Bake the biscuits for 10 minutes or until cooked, and cool on the cookie sheets for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

Ice the cooled biscuits with glace icing (icing sugar, a teaspoon of lemon juice, and water) of a colour of your choosing, and decorate with sugar decorations (eg silver cachous, sprinkles). I chose silver and white because I liked the colour scheme. If you have made a hole for tree decorations in each biscuit, cut short lengths of thin fabric or paper ribbon and thread through each hole, and knot at the top to secure. Hang the biscuits on your Christmas tree as edible decorations.

You can see the cookie roundup here - I never knew that there was so many types of cookies!