Chocolate Stamped Cookies

Since I got my cookie stamp, it appears that my Mum has had a bit of a revival on hers as well, because she's making stamped cookies every other week it seems. Though she's going for savoury versions and experimenting with new recipes and colours.

I thought I'd make some chocolate ones and again opted to use one of the recipes in the booklet that came with the cookie press. I halved the amount, as I thought 12 dozen was over the top, small as they may be. But the recipe was not quite right to begin with, I had to tweak it in order to be able to stamp the cookies in the first place.

Ingredients

makes around 70

250 g plain flour
30 g cocoa powder
170 g unsalted butter 125 g caster sugar
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp vanilla essence
1 large egg

Royal icing for decoration

2 dl icing sugar
1 egg white

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 190 ° C and place 3 baking trays in the freezer to chill. Then sift together the flour and cocoa powder.
2. Cream together the butter, sugar and salt in a large bowl until light and fluffy.
3. Add the vanilla and egg and incorporate well.
4. Slowly add the flour/cocoa mixture and keep whisking until it's formed a soft dough.
5. Take some of the dough, form into a sausage and place in the cookie press, closing with the pattern disk of choice.
6. Take one baking tray out of the freezer and stamp directly onto it, no baking paper, no greasing.
7. When the baking tray is full, bake the cookies for 8 - 10 minutes. Then remove onto a cooling rack and put the baking tray back in the freezer.
8. Repeat until all the dough has been used up.
9. Once all the cookies have cooled down, they can be iced. Stir egg white into thee icing sugar, a little at a time until the consistency is easy enough to pipe, but thick enough to keep its shape. Place in a piping bag, cut a tiny hole and pipe away.

It seems that for this particular recipe, there is no need to reduce the amount of flour, just because you're adding cocoa powder. I originally did that and had something not quite keeping together as a dough, but not a batter either.

Couldn't be stamped at all!

So I added more flour and at the point I hit the amount for the non-chocolate version, it just about came together to be stampable. Not all the shapes worked though. Still quite pleased with the end result, even if Lundulph grumbled that they were too small.

When the rest of the family turned up for Easter, they disappeared very quickly indeed, always nice.