Torcettini Cookies – Sugar Crusted Cookies – We Knead to Bake

I am in Trivandrum with my parents.

My kid is in Bangalore with my brother.

My husband is in Chennai all alone.

And all three of us are happy. This is how : I get a break from my routine jobs. My kid gets to play (and fight) with my 2-year-old niece Bhagus. And my husband gets some peace when he comes home from work ;-)

Well..actually, I am happy where I am, but I would be happier if I was with my husband and kid. Anyway, hubby is picking the kid and coming home this Sunday. So it will be family time again for another 3-4 days until he gets back to Chennai.

Torcettini cookies was this month’s choice for Aparna’s We Knead to Bake, which suited me fine because my father wanted me to bake him some cookies.

I made two more batches of cookies other than this recipe. It was about 150 cookies in total. The other ones were oatmeal raisin cookie and an icebox cookie recipe. The box that you see here is what I took home.

I hope father did get some of these to taste, cos it all got over in less than two days. My niece was happy and she had a couple of ‘bikkis’.

This recipe also goes to the last week of Blogging Marathon, a complete 30 day marathon for this month. This is the last week and the mood is to unwind and have a good time, so there is no particular theme as such.

Check out some of the cookie recipes in this space :

I have three more recipes in the drafts which I will be posting soon.

Recipe Source: Aparna has adapted this from A Baker’s Tour by Nick Malgieri

Makes: about 24 cookies

Ingredients:

Yeast Mix:

Active Dry Yeast : 1 1/4 tsp
Warm water : 1/2 cup

For the cookie dough:

All purpose flour : 1 1/2 cups
Butter : 40 gm (2.5 tbsp)
Salt : 1/2 tsp (omit if using salted butter)
Lemon zest : 1 tsp
Sugar : 1/3 cup (granulated white sugar)

Method:

Mix warm water and yeast. Set aside for ten minutes for bubbles to appear. I added a tsp of sugar to this.
I used food processor for making the dough. This can be kneaded with hands as well. Add the flour and salt in the food processor bowl and pulse a few times. Cut the butter into cubes and add it to the flour and pulse it till resembles fine crumbs. Add the yeast mix, lemon zest and let it run till it forms a dough ball.
Place this ball in a well oiled bowl and rotate so that the dough ball is coated with oil. Cover and keep aside for one hour.
An hour later (or after the dough has almost doubled), punch it down and keep it in the fridge for an hour (or 24 hours max).
To make cookies, preheat the oven to 170C. Take the dough out and roll it into a 6″ square. The size is just to get cookies of more or less the same size. Run the pizza cutter through the square to get 4 equal strips.
Cut each strip into 6 equal pieces.
Keep the sugar (1/3 cup) in a small plate near the cookies.
Take one strip, roll between your hands to get a rope and then shape it like a ribbon (like in the pictures). I cut the ends of the rope to get a flatter end.
Press this in sugar and line in a baking tray. Repeat with the other strips.
Bake for 20-25 minutes until the biscuit turns brown and looks done.