almond cookies

Almond cookies are yet another favourite during the chinese new year. These cookies are incredibly fragrant and nutty and are crispy at the same time. Somehow, they don't quite taste/feel the same as they're western counterpart. If you've haven't tried one before, I strongly suggest you do (unless you have an nut allergy) For people with nut allergy, they probably could try out suji cookies, which are actually crunchy butter cookies made with ghee. I haven't baked those for myself before but that will probably be on my to-bake items.

Today, I got myself a helper..my sister! Here she is, levelling out the baking soda.


I'm not sure if we got it wrong somewhere along the way, but the dough was really too crumbly. So we added more groundnut oil according to feel, so I also don't know exactly how much we added in total. We had a bit of issues cutting out the dough as it keeps breaking apart. I realised afterwards that those that have been rested for a while were much easier to handle with. Also, the cutter we used were too small! So I had to adjust the bake time and temp. [170C; 10 min]As a result, we had mini almond cookies instead which were equally delicious!
It was pretty difficult to roll the dough and i didn't wanna add too much flour. so i had flattened it with my hands a little so that minimal rolling would be required. I guess that sufficed for the moment. If i were to do it again, I'd 1. get a bigger cutter. 2. Probably add more oil/egg

We glazed the cookies with a whole egg. I was too lazy to separate and use just the yolk and it worked just as fine! Sprinkled on some sesame seeds for deco and off they were into the oven!

They were a tad too brown but still really yummy!

Look at how mini it was! I guess i really gotta use a bigger cookie cutter the next time round =X

I was pretty lazy to carry on rolling and cutting the remaining dough, plus i only lined 2 baking trays. So i thought of shaping the rest of the dough into balls (as seen from Elyn's blog) and placing them in small paper cups. that way it'd be so much easier! Like wise, we glazed them and sprinkled some sesame seeds over. These were thicker and larger, so i placed them in the oven longer. [170C; 15 min]

There you have it! All 100+ mini almond cookies packed into one small cny container! O.o

Something else to add, I was just browsing through and little did i realised that it has been a month since my first post! I really do hope i can persevere and not abandon updating this blog with my baking adventures and see myself celebrating my blog's yearly anniversary! *cross fingers*