Hazelnut Cookies

December 13th ~ St Lucia Day

Christmas cookies iced with pine branches

Early last year I was enticed after seeing it on social media to purchase the beautifully presented book Bakeland   Nothing else on my cookery bookshelf is quite like this book.  It is a work of art and truly inspirational, all the bakes are inspired by nature and Nordic scenery.  So this Christmas bake of artistic design comes from Bakeland.  You can, of course, use any cookie dough for this design, but I urge you to try this recipe it has a slight warm liquorice slant to it, delicious.  Not to everyone's taste admittedly but there is something quite lovely about these.  Perfect for those who crave a tad less sugar in their cookies I'd say!

Bakeland

Today we make Cookie Number 5 of the 7 in the lead up to Christmas 2019.  

Have you baked any cookies yet? 

Use a coffee grinder to grind 

Hazelnut Cookies 
with Star Anise


You will need:   

♥  225g butter
♥  200g sugar
♥  1 egg
♥  300g plain flour
♥  2 tsp ground star anise

When grinding spices they are
not always fine enough, so I also sieve it!

♥  1 tsp salt
♥  1 tsp baking powder
♥  150g hazelnuts, finely chopped
♥  20g pretzel sticks or twiglets at a push



For the icing:
♥  1 egg white
♥  1 tsp lemon juice
♥  200g icing sugar
♥  green liquid gel food colouring



*  Whisk the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy.

Cover the dough and refrigerate for at
least 30 minutes.  I have actually kept
mine in the fridge for up to 2
weeks before using it!

*  Add egg and keep mixing.

*  In a different bowl, sift the flour, star anise, salt and baking powder.  Mix together.  [For the star anise, I grind my own in an old coffee bean grinder that we now use only for spices, but you can use a pestle and mortar, or obviously buy ground star anise!]

*  Stir in the hazelnuts.

*  Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture.

*  Knead the dough until it forms a sticky ball.

*  Cover and refrigerate for a minimum of 30 minutes.

Create equal size oval cookie shapes

*  Preheat the oven to 190 degrees.

*  Divide the dough into oval shape balls, each should be 25g.  Place on a greaseproof paper-lined baking tray and flatten slightly.  I made a basic oval shape with my hands and then used a rolling pin to create an even depth to each cookie.  Each cookie should be about 3-5mm thick.

* Press pieces of pretzel into the cookies in branch shapes, make them different so to be more 'natural' rather than all the same.  I could not find the straight pretzel pieces so had to improvise and used Twiglets instead.  See photograph for clarification.

*  Bake in a preheated oven at 190 Degree Celsius for 8-10 minutes or until the edges have slightly darkened.

Add the branches before baking

*  Cool for a couple of minutes on the baking tray before transferring onto a wire rack. Cool completely before icing.










Icing the cookies:
Mix the icing sugar up using the lemon juice (it is best to strain the lemon juice to avoid any bits in the icing) and egg white as the fluid to form a paste thick enough to pipe and for it to hold its shape.  Add the green colouring too, adjust the consistency as necessary.  I needed LOTS of green colouring, probably did not use a good enough quality one and still, I would have preferred the green to have been darker, this is something I will look into, anyone have any suggestion of good food colouring for a strong colour to try?

Place the icing in a piping bag with a SMALL tip.  Pipe straight lines, it is best to draw the lines away from the pretzel sticks to look like needles on a pine tree.  Adding more pine needles in layers as the previous ones dry adds a certain amount of realism to the branches.

Have fun and play!

The icing began slowly but you quickly get into the rhythm of it, just
remember to ice away from the branches and JUST GO FOR IT

As the icing dried you can go back over and almost layer the pine needles upon
each other to try and create a more realistic edible pine branch !!!

Hazelnut cookies and the Bakeland book on my kitchen window sill

A very different looking cookie on the coffee table today.

♥  Wishing you all a Happy St Lucia Day 
and a wonderful weekend  ♥

To find out more about St Lucia, click : here.  You will also learn about the traditional bake that is made and eaten today 13th December all over Scandinvaia but especailly Sweden.