La vie est belle

Hope you are having a great week so far.  Well mine has been okay but for some reasons, this week I am not in the mood to take any food photos after I cook. I am feeling more lethargic than I normally do (despite getting my 8-9 hours sleep every night), I’m  also a little bloated and not very hungry! I’m blaming the post period. I am just so glad that it’s already mid-week. Two more days till the weekend! :) I’m meeting the girlfriends and a couple of more friends on Friday night for a celebration.

So …

I baked some Italian Orange Biscuits (with a little twist) on Sunday. The original recipe (from my baking book) uses orange zest only. My version has some extra fillings — chocolate chips and raisins! The combination of orange and chocolate is lovely! I also reduced the amount of butter and sugar a little bit. So the biscuits were not overly buttery and sweet.

This is yet another very easy recipe. Most of the time I look for  easy recipes that require minimal ingredients. So the biscuits consist of 80 – 90 grams of unsalted butter (original calls for 100  grams), 1 & 1/2 cups of plain flour, 1 & 2/3 cups of semolina, 2 eggs and 1/2 cups of caster sugar. I used less than that — maybe three-quarter of 1/2 cups. Just nice to my taste! So all these went into the food processor. How simple is that!

This is how I made each biscuit. A little time consuming but it’s all worth it.

Last step is to flatten the mini balls using your palm.

I made a few combinations:

• Original version i.e orange zest only.
• Original+ chocolate chips.
• Original + raisins.
• Original + chocolate chips + raisins.

My favourite is both the original and the original + chocolate chips :)  I’m not too fan of raisin fillings, unlike the husband. His favourite is original + raisins.

The taste?

They aren’t chewy cookies.  They are hard and crunchy (thanks to the semolina), like a biscoti but not as light as a biscotti. They are definitetly not too buttery. They are dry. I like my biscuits to be hard and dry. Well I also like chewy cookies.

Following is the recipe for Italian Orange Biscuits

Ingredients

• 100 grams unsalted butter, softened (I used only 80 – 90  grams)
• 1 & 1/2 cups of plain flour
• 1 & 2/3 cups of semolina
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cups of caster sugar (I used slightly less than 1/2 cups)

Method

Preheat oven 190 Celcius

Sift flour

Add all ingredients into a food processor

Process until all are combined. The original recipe says that the mixture is supposed to be soft but mine weren’t soft because I used less butter

Place in the fridge for 15 minutes

Shape into small balls and flatten each. Else place a tablespoon of the mixture onto a baking tray, then wet the palm of your hands and flatten them.

Bake for 15-20 minutes or until the edges are browned

Tags: baking, cookies

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.