Recipes sweet gifts for the New Year
Food Guides Gifts / / December 19, 2019
New Year gift for family, friends, and just people who you are cute, are perfect for their home-cooked sweets. Layfhaker selected three delicious options: berry marshmallow, chocolate-ginger cookies and Chinese fortune cookies, which, by the way, you can come up with themselves. ;)
Chocolate and ginger biscuits
Ingredients:
- 3⅓ cups flour;
- ½ cup unsweetened cocoa;
- ¾ cup brown sugar;
- ¾ tsp baking powder;
- 1 tablespoon of cinnamon;
- 1 tablespoon ground ginger;
- ¾ teaspoon ground cloves;
- ½ teaspoon salt;
- 1 teaspoon orange zest;
- 12 tablespoons butter;
- 1 egg room temperature;
- ¾ cup molasses or buckwheat honey;
- 50 g of dark chocolate;
- ¾ cup of dried cranberries (optional).
preparation
Preheat oven to 175 degrees and prepare a baking sheet.
Put all the dry ingredients except the chocolate and cranberries in a large bowl and mix thoroughly. Then add to the butter and using a hand mixer or bring the dough to a state of sand crumbs: the oil is mixed with flour and could squeeze in between fingers pancake. Then add the chocolate and stir again all.
In a separate bowl, beat egg and molasses or honey, add the remaining ingredients and knead until smooth. Divide dough into two parts, roll them into layers of a thickness of about 6 mm. Wrap with cling film and send it in the refrigerator for at least 15 minutes, but better - a couple of hours.
Then remove one part of the test, once again go over it with a rolling pin to smooth out all the bumps and use the molds to cut biscuits. Put the cookies on a baking sheet and send in the oven for 8-10 minutes. You can check the readiness of a match or a wooden toothpick - it should come out of a dry biscuit.
Even if you think that the cookies are too soft, do not care to get, especially if you are not using molasses, and honey. So you'll have a really soft and very tasty gingerbread cookies!
You can change the composition of spices on your own, add dried fruit or nuts. One thing should be untouchable - a ginger. For example, I have not had ground cloves, so I used a ground cardamom and add some nutmeg.
berry marshmallow
Ingredients:
- 2 large apples;
- 80 g cranberry or any other berries (can be frozen);
- Sugar 420 g;
- 1 egg protein;
- 80 ml of water;
- 10 g of agar;
- icing sugar for decoration.
preparation
Divide each apple into 4 pieces, remove core and bake at 160 degrees for about an hour. This is done so that excess liquid was evaporated and the applesauce to give a thick, otherwise the marshmallow will be a long time to freeze. The berries need to defrost and drain the excess water.
Agar-agar pour 80 ml of water. Ready apples and berries are crushed into a puree and passed through a sieve. For marshmallow requires 150 g of apple puree and 50 grams of berry.
During the cooking time apple-berry weight increased by almost half, so I recommend to choose a capacious bowl. In the bowl lay out puree, 200 g of sugar, protein half and beat until smooth.
Swollen shift the agar in a saucepan and put on a small fire. Once it turns into a jelly, add sugar to. Bring it to the boil and cook for about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat, when a spoon begins to stretch the thread.
The mashed with sugar, add the remaining white and whip again until it starts to increase in volume and lighten. Thereafter, while continuing to work with a mixer, a thin stream of syrup pour agar and continue beating 5-7 minutes or more until a steep protein peaks (for meringue).
Lecturing marshmallow mass in a pastry bag and squeeze small portions to the prepared surface (I had a pan with baking paper). Leave to dry for a day. Ready marshmallow sprinkled with powdered sugar. Your gift is ready!
I decided instead to use cranberries blueberries, but rushed - not thawed berries until the end. As a result, marshmallow turned inside wetter than expected. Hands take was uncomfortable, but still delicious! At the second attempt, I took into account all the nuances and the most authentic homemade marshmallows.
Finally, it is advisable not to replace the agar-agar gelatin - to freeze will be much worse.
Chinese fortune cookies
Ingredients:
- 1 cup flour;
- ¼ cup rice flour;
- 2 teaspoons starch;
- ½ teaspoon salt;
- 1 cup sugar;
- 4 egg whites;
- ¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil;
- 3 tablespoons water;
- 1 tablespoon of vanilla or almond extract or a pinch of vanilla.
preparation
Preheat oven to 175 degrees and blanketed paper pan for baking.
In a large bowl, mix all the dry ingredients. Proteins lightly whip in a separate bowl. The flour mixture to make a hole and pour back vegetable oil, water, and vanilla extract. Well it stirred a rubber spatula and add half of the protein. Again, mix thoroughly to avoid lumps. The mixture should turn out dense and smooth.
Poured into the protein remains of a bowl and beat until smooth dough. It should be able to look like a thick biscuit dough. If suddenly, for whatever reason, the dough came out too thick (depending on the size of eggs and flour), add a little water or egg white.
Ready mass spread on a baking sheet for about ½ tablespoon with a rather large intervals (about 7 cm), as you will need to make these small drops of pancakes. With a spoon, a rubber blade or kitchen spatula make cookies flat and round. Diameter, you can choose your own. During the experiments, I stopped by 8 inches.
Send in the oven for 8-10 minutes or until tender. Make sure that the edges are not much dry, or when folding the pastry will break. Pulls out of the oven, quickly flip, invest a note with the prediction, folding half, and gives the shape for fixing in a form Collapsible cupcake tins or something like.
It is not necessary to lay out on a baking sheet once a lot of cookies, even if they are placed there because you just do not have time to roll them up before they cool down and lose their elasticity. I get to do no more than four at a time. Also, do not strongly shake up proteins, as the dough starts to rise and you need flat pancakes. So try to make it in the oven they went no more than 2 mm thick.
You can divide the dough into smaller pieces and add food coloring to each - get a multi-colored fortune cookies.
If you want to keep it crispy, store it in a bag.