Fresh baked cookies, warm, scrumptious and slightly gooey straight from the oven. Mmm! Heather passed this recipe on to me last year, and the joy of it is you can make the cookie dough up in advance and keep it in the fridge. What’s so exciting about that? Slices of cookie dough take just 4 minutes to cook in a hot oven. So… if you have an Aga (or pre-heated oven), a farmhouse and some mountains, this means that you can have a wonderful walk then have freshly baked cookies on the table before people have even finished smiling and taking their boots off. Then they smile again when the cookies land on the table. Neat.
Orange & Lemon Cookies (Makes about 60 small cookies)
200g plain flour
¼ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 large egg
150g butter
200g caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 orange
1 large lemon
Cream together the butter and sugar (electric handwhisk rather good for this). Mix in the beaten egg and vanilla essence. Add the zest of the orange and lemon. If either of them are rather small specimens, I add the zest of a second one too. Add the flour, salt and baking powder and mix thoroughly.
The mixture should now be in a state where you can form it into a ball of dough. Roll it out into a long sausage shape (remember playdough and plasticine?!), then wrap it in kitchen foil and put it in the fridge to chill for an hour. The dough can be kept in the fridge for up to a week.
When you want fresh cookies, slice sections of the cookie dough and place on greaseproof paper or other baking sheet on a tray. Leave plenty of space between them as they spread out as they cook, and bake in a hot oven (220C) for about 4 minutes until golden. Leave them to cool for a minute, then they solidify enough to transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling – or onto a plate ready to eat.
Eat these cookies and more home cooked delights whilst you de-stress, recharge and relax in the Welsh Mountains www.more-to.org
Just been a domestic goddess and made your fabulous cookies – didn’t make 60, yours must have been quite dainty, I made 20 huge ones! They are delicious and aren’t going to last very long in my house. Thank you for sharing your recipe Sarah x