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Tea cookies
Marian: Recipe Thread: December 17, 2008
This is what I make most frequently when I feel like I need to bake something for person/event x but can’t afford to try anything new and therfore possibly disasterous. They are demanded every month by the little old ladies in my mother’s bridge group (unless that’s just her way of getting me to make them). Anyway, that being the case, these are also what I make most often around Christmas, and the association has stuck. The recipe is a (very) much adulterated version of tea cookies that my grandmother used to bake (I was only allowed one cookie at a time, which is another reason why I bake them whenever I have an excuse).
1/2 cup butter
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup sugar (preferably 1/2 brown well packed, and 1/2 white)
1 tbsp milk or cream
1 cup flour (sifted if you have the patience, which I almost never do)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 cup quick oats (or slow oats, blitzed to a similar consistency in your food processor or brave coffee grinder)
1/4 cup – 2/3 cup of shredded coconut, depending on your threshold for the stuff (and not dessicated, if possible)
1/4 cup of ground nuts. I like hazelnuts best. (optional)
icing sugar for dusting
good raspberry jam for nesting (I like a tart jam with these – something where sugar is the second ingredient. Although a jar of homemade is obviously ideal, for those who are lucky enough to have Aunt Mildred bottling away all year long.
Preheat your oven to 350, and butter a couple of pans (or pans with parchement on them – in which case still butter the parchement)
-Cream the butter.
-Beat in the egg, then the vanilla, then the sugar, then the milk/cream.
-Add the flour and the baking powder and soda in three or four stages, until it’s nice and smooth-like.
(if you were mixing electric up until this point, then switch to a fork or whatever you like best – I just go fork all the way, myself)
-Add the oats, then the coconut and the ground nuts.
-When everything is mixed, drop by mounded spoonfuls onto your trays. Depending on how buttery you were willing to get, or not get, these can either stick pretty close to the shape you dropped them in, or flatten and expand. Allow some room in any case, and let the first round be your guide.
-My enthusiastic oven cooks these in as little as six minutes, but maybe 8-10, depending. Until they’re turning pale gold at the edges.
-Right out of the oven, push a little finger indent into each of them while still soft.
-Switch over to racks when they’re sturdy enough not to fall apart, and when they’re entirely cool, dust icing sugar over them artfully, and put about a teaspoon or so of jam into each of your indents.
Obviously these can be done without jam at all. They’re also good with raisins, without (or still with) the coconut, with a teaspoon of cinnammon, etc.
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