Christmas Cookies

The Christmas spirit is finally in the air in our home. We managed to put our small Christmas tree up, spread some cute decorations around the living room and start the race of Christmas shopping.

To embrace the Christmas spirit even more I spent my Saturday morning baking little cute cookies with a recipe that I adapted from one my mum used to bake when I was a child. This is not the traditional Christmas sugar cookies recipe but if you trust me you will find out they taste very nice. And with some decoration they can be easily called Christmas cookies.

My Christmas Cookies Recipe

150g of unsalted butter (cut in small pieces)

700g of flour

2 eggs

1 1/2 cup of sugar

1 teaspoon of baking powder

250g of mascarpone cheese

Start mixing 500g of flour, the butter and the eggs in a bowl with a hand mixer. This mixture gets really dry and crumbly.

In a separate bow, still using the hand mixer in lower speed, mix the mascarpone cheese, sugar and the baking powder.

Combine both mixtures in one bowl and use the hand mixer for more 2 or 3 minutes until totally incorporated. Cover the bowl with cling film and bring the dough to the fridge to rest for 30 minutes.

Transfer the dough to a flat floured surface. At this point it should be just a bit sticky and from now on you need to work the dough and add the rest of the flour (200g) bit by bit until you it becomes light and smooth.

Divide the dough in 3 equal parts and open each part with a rolling pin until it is about 1/2 a centimetre thick. Using cookie cutters cut your preferred shapes. Place the cut cookies in a flat baking sheet lined with parchment paper and bring to the oven to bake.

The baking time will vary depending of each oven. What you are looking for is a cookie that is firm at the borders, a bit soft in the middle and not too brown. Each of my batches cooked in 8 minutes in 150 degrees Celsius.

After the cookies were ready we had fun decorating them with melted chocolate and colored sugar sprinkles. We used 200g of melted white chocolate and 200g of melted dark chocolate plus a lot of sprinkles. To melt the chocolate just cut each chocolate bar in small pieces and bring to the microwave in medium temperature for 3 minutes.

We finished up wrapping the cookies in small gift bags for little Christmas treats to friends.