Melomakarona - 300th POST!

This is my Christmas present to all of you this year. For my 300^th post (!), I bestow the recipe for the best cookies in the entire world. And I’m posting it in plenty of time so that you can go out and get the ingredients and set aside the time to make them. You honestly won’t regret it.

These are Greek Christmas cookies that you are only allowed to make at Christmas (according to my Greek friend!). They are delicately spiced, sweetened with syrup and they are my EVERYTHING. The amount of ingredients sounds ridiculous – and it is! This is a serious Christmas cookie recipe, you get about 60 of them. Enough to get you through the whole holiday season of gorging.

THIS ISN'T EVEN ALL OF THEM

Now, the recipe looks a little funny. I’ve never baked cookies with orange juice before. I've never dunked hot cookies in syrup before. I was worried that the dough wouldn’t come together and would be too sticky. I was worried the cookies would fall apart in the syrup. But it went great, it all worked out, trust me and just go with it. I bravely went first so that I could light the path for you guys.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Ingredients for syrup

• 375ml water
• 600g granulated sugar
• 100g honey
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 3 whole cloves
• 1 vanilla pod
• ½ an orange, halved again

For the cookies

• 400 ml orange juice
• 400 ml sunflower oil
• 180 ml olive oil
• Grated zest of 1 orange
• 1 kilo all-purpose flour
• 50 g icing sugar
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves
• 3 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ginger
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 200 g fine semolina

To Finish

• A few tbsp. honey
• A handful of chopped walnuts

Method

Start with the syrup, you can make this a few hours beforehand (it has to be cool before you dip the cookies in it) or even the night before.

Add all of the ingredients except for the honey to a saucepan and gently heat until the sugar has melted and liquid is clear. Stir every now and again.

Remove from the heat and add the honey. Then set aside until cooled and ready to use.

When you’re ready to make the cookies, preheat the oven to 190C.

Add the orange juice, oils and orange zest into one bowl and whisk with a fork.

To another, bigger, bowl, add the flour, icing sugar, spices, bicarb and semolina.

Make a well and add the wet into the dry ingredients.

Mix very briefly, up to half a minute maximum.

Shape the dough with your hands into slightly flattened oval shape, about 4cm long.

Bake for 20-25 minutes until golden brown and crispy.

Place the hot cookies in the syrup a few at a time. Dunk them real good so they're covered and coated in syrup.

A spatula will help

Coat in syrup and remove to a wire rack to dry off (I put a load of tinfoil underneath to catch the syrupy drips and make cleanup easier).

Drizzle over some honey and sprinkle over the walnuts and allow to dry and crisp up.

ENJOY

Spiced Festive Cupcakes

It’s the season where I add cinnamon and ginger and cloves to EVERYTHING. I have a little jar of spices I mixed together just for the wintery bakes (of course I do) and it comes in handy at times like this.

For the spice mix, I add together something roughly like 6 tbsp ground cinnamon, 2 tbsp ground cloves, 2 tsp ground nutmeg, 1 tbsp ground ginger, 2 bits of star anise, cinnamon bark and 6 cardamom pods into a small kilner jar. Then I mix it all together and use it throughout my Christmas bakes!

Whatever  you decide to use, these cupcakes are supremely delicious and you’re all welcome for this gorgeous recipe. I decided to ice them in a very festive way, with little wreaths and trees which are ridiculously simple to pipe (it’s just little splodges in shapes) and look (in my humble opinion) really cute!

Peppermint Creams

These are like After Eights on steroids. Creamy, sweet and minty, with a crunchy chocolate shell. I all at once love them and am a little intimidated by the sugar content. Definitely need to be eaten in moderation!

For me, the best Christmas flavours are chocolate and mint, and these fit nicely on my festive table alongside After Eights, Thorntons mint collection and mint Matchmakers!

These aren’t the simplest to make, I initially made the error of trying to cut several at once, and when I went back to the first ones I had cut, to move them to the tray, they were already too sticky to move.  You’ll need a lot of icing sugar to cut them out easily. If you’re still struggling, pop the rolled out dough in the freezer for a few minutes to firm up.

They are TOTALLY worth the effort!

Orange and Almond Cake

So, I was making candied orange peel. As you do. Because it’s the season of oranges and cinnamon and sweet things to help us through the short days.

..And I had lots of orange syrup left over from the boiling of the peel with sugar, so I wanted to use it to make a lovely moist festive orange cake. The nutty almonds, sweet syrup and zesty zest work together to make this the ultimate tea-time cake.

And another welcome use for this cake is after a Christmas dinner - I don't like Christmas pudding but this one can be rigged up (depending on how fancy your cake tins are) to look just like one and (for me) it tastes so much better!

I used a little fancy cake tin and though it was more difficult to extricate the cake (it required heavy greasing beforehand and careful handling after!) it gave it a fancy finish that I really loved.

Candied Orange Peel

It’s definitely time for autumnal and Christmas flavours  to start shining through!

I have never made candied peel, so I thought I should give it a whirl, seeing as these citrus-y sweet little nuggets can adorn any festive bake – mince pies, stollen, chocolate marzipan.. And then you’ve got the non-seasonal applications like cannoli.

What’s left of the simple syrup which has been deliciously infused with orange can also be re-used, I am planning to use it to make a deliciously moist orange drizzle cake. Waste not, want not!

Anyway, this is easy and it made my house smell delicious. What more do you want?

Cannoli

Oh, this is a little treat. I think of baking as my hobby, and as with most hobbies, sometimes you get stuck in a rut. I think brownies are my rut – I’ve been known to make brownies and only brownies for weeks. They’re easy, delicious and altogether pleasing. But sometimes you want to get out of the rut. You gotta make something new, and something a little tricky.

Enter, cannoli.

I have enjoyed these little crunchy sweet morsels a lot in the last few years, I’ve gotten them from bakeries, markets and Italian delis. And Italy. So delicious. And too hard to make at home, or so I thought. The hardest bit was sourcing ingredients - I couldn't find any traditional (sweet) marsala wine, so I just used regular white wine and they tasted legit!

Like with most hobbies, you need equipment sometimes. I did have to buy these cannoli rings to enable me to make them, but they cost £7 and arrived via next day delivery. That’s the price of 2 costa coffees or one medium-fancy gin – well worth it because I’ll get my money’s worth. They will  be added to my niche kitchen equipment collection which includes donut pans and a sugar thermometer. Very useful gear.

I learned a lot by doing this. You need to roll the dough as thin as you can, with a second roll once you’ve cut it out. And then when sealing the ends together, seal the entirety of the dough where the two ends meet or else it’ll open up. Learn by my example!

Vegan Coconutty Oaty Cookies

I am always up for a baking challenge, and I fancied taking on the challenge of feeding my vegan colleagues at work! I feel bad leaving them out when I bring in my baked goods, so I put my mind to finding some easy vegan recipes. There are a ton of dairy free spreads out there, so that isn’t hard, but eggs are somewhat ubiquitious in baking, and therein lay the difficulty.

Countless google searches and I found an interesting recipe to build on. But I admit, I was sceptical. I didn’t think it was possible to get such chewy and amazingly light cookies without eggs being involved somehow. But these are a damn revelation. Perfect chewiness, easy to make, taste amazing. Win win win.

You know how Phoebe brags that she makes the best oatmeal raisin cookies in the world (but she doesn't make them very often because she doesn't think it's fair to the other cookies!) - well these are those cookies. They look unassuming but they pack a punch!

Makes just over a dozen chunky cookies