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amor, baking, cheap, chocolate, cookies, cooking, dessert, diy, February, food, gift, giving, Green & Blacks, homemade, improvisation, ingredients, j'adore, lifestyle, love, procrastination, recipe, red velvet, saving money, simple, St. Valentine, student, Sunday, sweet, Valentine's day
With St.Valentine’s day under 2 weeks away, I decided to share with you my recipe for red velvet cookies especially for the occasion. I know many people are making gifts instead of buying gifts this year due to the “triple dip” recession; so here’s a simple recipe you can follow to woo your sweetheart!
Ingredients (12 big cookies): 250g Plain Flour 1/2 Teaspoon Bicarbonate Soda 1/2 Teaspoon salt 170g Unsalted butter 200g Soft brown sugar 100g Caster sugar (granulated) 1 egg + 1 egg yolk 1 Tablespoon of vanilla flavoring 2-3 Teaspoons of red food colouring 100g Green & Black’s chocolate (flavour of your choice, I used Butterscotch)Firstly you need to pre-heat your oven to 170°C / 340°F.
Then sieve your plain flour, bicarb, and salt in to a dry bowl and set aside.
I find buying these small sachets of Bicarb useful, as they take up less space in your cupboard and they are already pre-measured. Simples.
With a separate bowl, mix in your sugars and butter. Mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon.
You should end up with something like this…
Now add your vanilla flavouring and your eggs…
You should end up with this lovely looking mixture here…
Slowly add your mixture to the flour mix, to get a light coloured cookie mix
Now to make your cookies pink! Add 2-3 teaspoons of your food colouring to suit the shade you desire.
Roughly chop your chocolate, I recommend using a high quality one, just for the sake of indulgence (it is Valentines after all)!
Make sure your baking trays are lined with grease proof paper, and spoon a small amount of mixture into individual spaces. Caution: these cookies will expand in the oven so may double in size.
Now, for the stamps… If you choose to decorate your cookies by using cookie stamps, I advise you do this mid-way through the baking process. Too early and the design won’t come out in detail, too late and your design won’t appear on the cookie at all. So when your cookies feel slightly firm to touch, and a knife brings out no crumbs – GENTLY stamp your cookies.
After stamping place them back in the oven for a further 5-7 minutes, and you should end up with something like this…
Place your cookies on a rack to cool, and within 10 minutes they’re ready to eat! Still lovely and gooey from the oven. Delicious!
A couple of my cookies didn’t turn out the way I wanted, so I improvised and whipped up some red icing (2-3 drops of colouring to 3 teaspoons of icing sugar + dash of warm water), to create some decorative cookie pieces.
A simple recipe, yet good enough for Saint Valentine himself! Happy days.