Spring 2020Cookies recipe

By Natasha Brown, owner of Brown’s Cakes

We make these cookies all the time for all sorts of occasions. This recipe would be perfect for making cookies for Easter or for the kids to have a go at (with a bit of help) for Mother’s Day.

Ingredients
110g salted butter (at room temperature)
55g caster sugar
137g plain flour
Grated zest from half a lemon or Chocolate chips

Method
Set the oven to warm at 150°C.

Cream the butter and sugar together until soft and smooth.

Sift in the flour and add the lemon zest before bringing everything together with your hands, kneading the mixture until it becomes a ball. If you want to make chocolate chip cookies, leave out the lemon zest and knead in chocolate chips once the flour is added.

Roll the dough out on a floured surface and cut out cookies. The dough should be just less than 1cm thick. If you have a cutter – great – if not you can make round cookies by cutting the shape with a plastic cup.

Transfer the cookies to a sheet of baking paper and lay this onto a baking tray.

Bake in the centre of the oven for around 13 to 15 minutes. We turn the baking tray round after about 8 minutes to give a more even bake. The cookies should be lightly golden and will still be a little soft, so be careful getting them out of the oven and let them cool before removing from the baking paper.

Once they’ve cooled, they are delicious eaten as they are, but if you like you can decorate them with icing and sprinkles or melted chocolate.

To decorate with chocolate
125g chocolate

Break the chocolate into small pieces and melt slowly in the microwave. Keep repeating 10 second blasts on high and stir the chocolate in between each blast. When the chocolate is fully melted, dip the cookies in the chocolate or drizzle it over the cookies. Adding sprinkles over the melted chocolate works well too.

To decorate with icing
125g icing sugar
Food colouring
15ml warm water
Sprinkles

Sift the icing sugar into a bowl and gradually add the warm water. If it is too thick, carefully add more water half a teaspoon at a time as it can go from too thick to very runny very quickly!

Spoon the icing onto the cookies or use a piping bag if you have one, then cover with sprinkles while the icing is still wet.

The pink icing on our cookies in the photo above was made by adding a tiny amount of pink food colouring to half the icing. We then covered the cookies with pink icing and piped on small white dots.

We covered others with pink icing, piped lines of white icing across the cookies then used a pin to drag a line, first down the cookie and then upwards inbetween the lines to create the  feathered design (this technique is a bit tricky and I wouldn’t recommend this for small children).

If children are decorating the cookies, they will love decorating with icing or chocolate and sprinkles.