BlauPause and Seahorse Cookies - Part 2 - The Recipe

I decided that today was the day I was going to bake the seahorse cookies. Anything that can get baked early for next weekend is going to get BAKED EARLY. In addition to BlauPause next Sunday is my daughters birthday and of course her birthday party. We are doing polka dots. I will make sure I post all the details later. The food is all going to be very dotty!

Here is my very cute seahorse cookie cutter. Bought on Amazon, of course!

Ingredients

	250 g	Butter (@ room temperature)
	200 g	Sugar
	1 pkt	Vanilla sugar
	2	Eggs
	2 tsp.	Baking powder
	500 g	Flour
	150 g	Ground almonds

Method

The instructions that came with the recipe (which, by the way, I have amended) go something like this: Mix into a dough. Cut out cookies. Bake. So here are some more detailed instructions!

First of all I doubled the recipe. I needed as many as I could get because who knows how many people are going to show up. Probably not as many as we would like because the publicity for the event is terrible. There is not a single flyer, poster or banner up any where where we live (which is practically next door to the university). Good thing that these cookies last for ever!

I decided to put this together in the order of a regular cake. So first I beat together the butter and sugars until they were light and fluffy. Then went in the eggs one at a time, beating each time to make sure that the eggs were well incorporated. Next came the dry stuff ... and oops ... my mixer was not made for such a huge amount of batter. I had to stop and take the whisks out otherwise it would have gone up into the mechanism! So I just mixed the rest of it the good old fashioned way... NO I did not use my hand... I used a spoon! Now usually I would use my hands to mix such a dough but this was going to go to people that I didn't know so I figured I better be a bit more hygienic!! 

There was too much dough to make one ball so I made 4 balls. Hang on a sec I had to use my hands to make the balls. So it would not have made much of a difference, I should have just mixed everything with my hands. A bit late to realize that now, isn't it?

The dough was then wrapped in cling wrap and put in the fridge to rest. I think for about an hour. I really like to let my cookie dough cool off. It makes it much easier to cut and the cookies seem to keep their shape much better. In an ideal world you would cool it, cut them and then cool the cutouts for at least half an hour before baking them. I never have enough room in my fridge for cookie trays so I never bother about this. Unless, of course, it is winter and then I put the baking trays out on the balcony to cool. 

I wanted the cookies to be a bit thicker because I didn't want them to break apart and I wanted each cookie to be substantial. But you can roll these cookies pretty thin and make them really crisp if you like. The plan is also to decorate them but if I get around to that it is a whole different blog!

I rolled the dough out on a floured surface to about 4 mm thickness and went about cutting my seahorses. I ended up with just over 150 pieces! Then I baked them in the oven at 160 C (fan oven) for 20 minutes. The result was the perfect cookie. 

I really wanted to decorate these and I even experimented. But given all the other things I had to do for this weekend I didn't get round to decorating all of them. In fact I only decorated 20 :( 

Come over during the BlauPause and enjoy one on the house.