Pinwheel Cookies

Thanks to my daughter that this year to celebrate Christmas I was able to fulfill my dream of making Pinwheel cookies which were pending for so many years into my do to list. Lil K wanted this year to treat Santa with the Pinwheel cookies which she had seen in the picture and loved it. Christmas brings us joy and also a welcoming music to embrace a brand new year. So the whole month of December we pass with a joy of merriment and in a mood of celebration.  The streets, the homes all get lighten up and brighten up with the Christmas decors. The Christmas trees get ornamented from shopping Malls to Home. The kids wait since a long time and cross their fingers to open up their eyes with a bright morning of the day of Christmas to check how many gifts Santa has showered them. This expectation and the ritual have not been changed a bit. From my childhood to my daughters era Santa is welcomed with the Milk and cookies and a list of gifts that is wanted from him. Fest of Christmas brings joy at each individual’s heart which is now widely celebrated all over the world with a gala celebration. Let us now move to the recipe of Pinwheel Cookies.

{Recipe adapted from HERE. I have halved the measurement and it yields to 11-12 cookies}

Ingredients

Butter : 100gm (I have taken 1 tbspoon from it to use it later)

Sugar : 1/2 cup

Egg yolk : 1

Vanilla Essence: 2 tspns

Milk : 2 tbspn ( keep handy for more too)

Flour: 1 & 1/2 cup

Baking Powder : 1/2 tbspn

3 tbspns cocoa powder mixed with 1 tbspn melted butter and 1 tbspn milk..

Method:

1. First make the cocoa powder mixture. Melt 1 tbspn butter in 1 tbspn milk for a few seconds in the microwave.
2. Add 3 tablespoons cocoa powder and mix well and reserve.
3. Sift the flour together with the baking powder.
4. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
5. Add egg yolk  beat well.
6. Add vanilla, then 2 tablespoons milk beating until well mixed.
7. At low speed, gradually add the sifted dry ingredients and mix well. Then increase speed to medium and beat until the dough leaves the side of the bowl. Use your hand and knead in to a nice dough.
8. Divide the dough. Remove about ¾ of the dough and set aside. That portion will be the vanilla dough.
9. To the  other dough add the chocolate mixture and knead nicely. This forms the chocolate dough.
10. On a sheet of waxed paper, roll vanilla dough into a rectangle . Repeat with the chocolate dough in the same manner in to another wax paper.
11. Flip rolled chocolate dough onto vanilla dough and peel off waxed paper. Lightly press the surface with a rolling pin to adhere both the vanilla and chocolate dough.
12. With the short end facing you, roll the dough tightly into a log, wrap in plastic wrap and chill in refrigerator.
13. After about 30 minutes take the logs out of the refrigerator and roll on the counter to retain the circular shape and prevent one side from flattening.
14. Wrap tightly again in plastic wrap, place in freezer-safe container and freeze for about an hour or store in freezer and bake as needed.
15. When ready to bake, pre-heat oven to 160 decree C.
16. Thaw cookie log just slightly and slice to about ¼ thickness with a sharp knife.
17. Place cookie slices on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and bake for 25 to 30 minutes.
18. Remove cookies from pan and place in cooling rack to cool and then serve.

Note:

Before you slice the cookies putting it in the freezer for at least one hour is a must. Otherwise the the design of the cookies will not come out neat. Please see my cookies. I was in hurry, so I have kept it only 15 mnts in the freezer and got specks of chocolates on the white part.

Sending this to the "Baking Palooza 2013" by Kolkata Food Bloggers:

Wish you Merry Christmas with Checkerboard Cookies

Wish you all a very Happy Christmas. Hope some of you are having and some of you already have a gala Christmas Feast along with all the mouth watering dishes and surprised gifts from Santa Claus with your family and friends. Though the Christmas bell has started to ring few weeks back of the respective day, when the house started to become fully aromatic with the small of baking cookies and cakes, buying gifts and packing them with colourful papers and shifting them in to decorated bags especially for this very day. The decoration every where is worth seeing. Even for my lil daughter's sake we also bought an artificial Christmas tree, decorated it to feel the spirit whole heartedly.

This time I tried this Checkerboard Cookies which came out real nice and tasty, though the visual satisfactory part of the checkers are not up to the mark. But still for a first time attempt it's not that bad too. I adapted the recipe from Here and this video also helped me a lot to make this cookie.

Note:

I am not writing the ingredients and the procedure again only to save my time as I followed the recipe more or less the same way it said. But would like to mention the variations I made. I made all the measurement of the ingredients half to make a small amount of cookies. I didn't use the lemon extract. I added an egg. As long as you will keep the dough in the refrigerator it will be easy to handle.

Once again wish you all Merry Christmas and a Happy new year in advance.
Updating the post : Sending it to the ongoing event by Kolkata Food Bloggers...

Rolled Sugar Cookies:-

I am happy to announce that my second attempt to bake cookies is a grand success. First time it became an unsuccessful outcome. But this time all the three of us (My husband, my daughter and me) enjoyed the soft, sweet and toasty cookies till the last bite. The taste of the cookies had just taken me 14-15 years back to my home town in Bengal, where the Bakery man used to sell these kinds of cookies, on his mobile cart, door to door. We used to call it “Sandesh Biscuit”. The taste of the cookies made me totally nostalgic with all those childhood memories. I realised that unlike other memories, few tastes are there which never fades and the association between the taste and memory gives birth of a sweet trance from which we never want to return and we just want to inhale the full charm of it.

Before elucidating the baking process of the Rolled Sugar Cookies, let us know little bit information about Cookies.

By definition, a cookie can be any of a variety of hand-held, flour-based sweet cakes, either crisp or soft. Originally called "little cakes," cookies are made with sweet dough or batter, baked in single-sized servings and eaten out-of-hand. The name cookie is derived from the Dutch word koekje, meaning "small or little cake." The first cookies were created by accident. Cooks used a small amount of cake batter to test their oven temperature before baking a large cake. “Each country has its own word for ‘Cookie.’ What we know as cookies are called Biscuits in England and Australia, in Spain they're Galletas, Germans call them Keks or Plätzchen for Christmas cookies, and in Italy there are several names to identify various forms of cookies including Amaretti and Biscotti, and so on. Biscuit comes from the Latin word Bis coctum, which means, ‘twice baked’.”In America, a cookie is described as a thin, sweet, usually small cake. The first American cookie was originally brought to this country by the English, Scots, and Dutch immigrants. The simple "butter cookies" strongly resemble the English tea cakes and the Scotch shortbread.

Here I am attaching the detail of the six basic cookie styles:-

“The earliest cookie-style cakes are thought to date back to seventh-century Persia, one of the first countries to cultivate sugar. There are six basic cookie styles, any of which can range from tender-crisp to soft. A drop cookie is made by dropping spoonfuls of dough onto a baking sheet. Bar cookies are created when a batter or soft dough is spooned into a shallow pan, then baked, cooled and cut into bars.

Hand-formed (or moulded) cookies are made by shaping dough by hand into small balls, logs, crescents and other shapes.

Pressed cookies are formed by pressing dough through a COOKIE PRESS (or PASTRY BAG) to form fancy shapes and designs.

Refrigerator (or icebox) cookies are made by shaping the dough into a log, which is refrigerated until firm, then sliced and baked. Rolled cookies begin by using a rolling pin to roll the dough out flat; then it is cut into decorative shapes with COOKIE CUTTERS or a pointed knife.

Other cookies, such as the German SPRINGERLE, are formed by imprinting designs on the dough, either by rolling a special decoratively carved rolling pin over it or by pressing the dough into a carved COOKIE MOLD.”

Ref: Oxford Encyclopaedia of Food and Drink in America, Andrew F. Smith editor [Oxford University Press: New York] 2004, Volume 1 (p. 317-8)

Ingredients:-

Sugar- 1 Cup

Butter or Margarine- 1 Cup softened

Milk- 3 Table spoon

Vanilla- 1 tea spoon

Egg- 1

All purpose flour- 3 Cups

Baking Powder- 1½ tea spoon

Salt- ½ tea spoon
For decoration I used- Choco Chips, Chocolate rice and Mixed nuts.

Method:-

In large bowl, combine sugar, butter, milk and egg; blend well. Add flour, baking powder and salt; mix well. Cover the plastic wrap; refrigerate 1 hour for easier handling.

Heat oven to 400F.On lightly floured surface, roll out 1/3 of the dough at a time to 1/8 thickness. Keep remaining dough refrigerated. Cut with flower cookie cutter. Place each 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets.

 If desired, sprinkle with sugar.

Note: The decorated cookies as shown in the picture are decorared before baking.

Bake at 400F for 5-9mnts or until edges are light brown. Immediately remove from the cookie sheets. Decorate as desired.You can decorate it with the coloured icing.

Imp Note: 1. The shaped cookies which I baked first, (you can see in the above  and below Pictures) I baked on the silver foil and greased it before baking. Therefore the laying side of the Cookie caught the burn colour very fast. Therefore ALWAYS BAKE THEM ON THE UNGREASED COOKIE SHEET (PERCHMENT OR WAX PAPER) 2. Don’t bake the cookies more than 6-8mnts. If you think that the cookies need more time to cook, turn off the oven, keep the cookies inside the oven for few mnts more.

The measurements I have given you will get approximately 3 to 4 dozen cookies. The count will be depending on the size and shapes of the cookies. If you don’t want to bake all the cookies at a time then you can store the cookies dough in the refrigerator for a couple of days more. But whenever you store it wrap it tightly and nicely with a plastic sheet. Before baking take out the dough and give it time to catch the room temperature.

The baked cookies should be stored in an air tight container. The cookies stay fresh for 1-2 weeks, may be more. But we never get a chance to watch, as the tasty bites disappear in no time.