For the past few weeks I’ve been baking every single weekend. It hasn’t been good for my waistline at all… but at least I’ve been able to experiment with various recipes. I feel that I’ve learned a lot these past few weeks. Some of the things might seem obvious to most people but as someone who’s never baked a cookie in her life it wasn’t. I’ve also accumulated a lot of dough. I only baked about 6-10 cookies with each batch, I have frozen the rest of the dough so that I can bake all the cookies this weekend for my schools cookie event next week. From my month of cookie baking I’ve learned the following.

1 Cookies don’t always need eggs. I dint’ know this. When I saw the recipe for the shortbread I thought “this can’t be right”… but turns out, it can.
Use baking parchment paper. This is important for two reasons, firstly it keeps the cookies from spreading too much. Secondly, it decreases the amount of dishes you have to wash afterwards.
Chilling the dough is important. At first I found this really time consuming, I’m not very patient, I want things done immediately, but now I plan ahead. Chilling he dough makes it more manageable and for some reason the cookie just turns out better.
Measuring is important. This past weekend I thought I could get away with not using the instructed amount of cocoa, because its only a flavour , but it turns out, not using the correct amount and not substituting it caused my cookies to be too soft and the spread too much in the pan. The result being extremely big and flat cookies that sticks to the parchment paper and breaks into pieces when you try to remove it.

For today’s cookies I’ve used the rest of the shortbread cookie dough that I had left. I got he original recipe from Sally’s baking addiction. I used her shortbread recipe for her Raspberry Almond thumbprint cookies.

I chilled the dough and rolled little flaky balls of dough in my hand until it formed a ball. I then rolled each little ball of dough into a stick

I baked them for 14 minutes. Once they cooled I melted some chocolate pieces with a tablespoon of milk and dipped the shortbread sticks in the chocolate. Immediately after I sprinkled some rainbow sprinkles on each stick and left the chocolate to dry.

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