Cosima Underwater

Can you tell we are gearing up for Christmas?

Little cookie monster and I are trying out a different recipes every weekend. Only the best will be on our final Christmas cookie list. Last week’s biscottis were my favorite, but little man didn’t like the hardness of them. So this week, we tried a more kids-friendly recipe:

Muerbeteig cookies with lemon icing and a ton of colorful sprinkles

Knead 70g of caster sugar and the mark of one vanilla bean into 140g of unsalted butter. This works best if you cut the butter into little cubes. Add one egg yolk, and 210g of flour. It’s a 3-2-1 Muerbeteig dough (3 parts flour, 2 parts fat, 1 part sugar), which also works great for tart bottoms. You can leave out the egg, but I find for cookies adding one egg yolk works best.

I don’t have a fancy kitchen machine, so we used our hands. There is something very satisfying about grabbing a handful of buttery dough and pressing it through your fingers. Through experience I have learnt to only put one hand into the dough, so that you still have one clean hand to prevent a little cookie monster from eating half of the dough or eating all the sprinkles :).

Wrap the dough into cling wrap and let it rest for at least 15 minutes in the fridge. You can also make the dough one day in advance and leave it in the fridge over night.

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius (320 Fahrenheit). Roll out the dough to about 5mm thickness on a floured work top, and then use cookie cutters or a small glass to cut out shapes. We got about 65 cookies. Lay them on a baking tray lined with baking paper, and bake for 10-15 minutes. We watched them all the time, you want them to brown only lightly.

Let them cool. For the icing, mix about 120g of icing sugar with a few tablespoons of lemon juice, until it becomes a gooey sauce. Brush the cookies with the icing, and then let little cookie monsters add the final decoration.

It was such fun to see little man enjoy making cookies and eating them. We agreed to only eat the broken cookies today. You know, the reindeers without horns and the Christmas trees without tops. There were surprisingly many of them. I am counting making cookies with little man today. He is such a sweet little cookie monster :).