Cherry Wink Cookies

Just before Christmas amidst my usual pre-Christmas baking flurry I promised to give you some recipes for the massive pile of biscuits I made. There is nothing especially Christmas-y about these except that they have a bright, red glace cherry on top, and for some reason I associate glace cherries with Christmas. And with gobbling down ice cream on a hot summer's evening (in summer on special occasions mum would make us an ice cream cone with (usually) vanilla ice cream and a glace cherry on top. There's nothing quite like licking your way around the cherry and then trying to push it down into the ice cream with your tongue so it won't fall off. And then of course you get a frostbitten tongue, but who cares?? You're eating ice cream!).

 

This one is from Margaret Fulton's Baking. I got this book for my 30th birthday from Kirsti. So far I have had two excellent biscuit-making experiences from it, and one really bad cake-making experience. At this point I'm inclined to blame the oven I used but I'm going to have to try and make that cake again to figure it out. And then give the cake away immediately that I have taste-tested one slice, because although it was a disaster I still ate more of it than I ought to have!

 

To the biscuits! (or, cookies for the American readers)

 

INGREDIENTS:

1.5c (225g) plain flour

2tsp baking powder

Pinch salt

125g butter, softened

0.5c (110g) castor sugar

1.5tsp vanilla

2tbsp honey

1 egg

2tbsp milk

2c corn flakes, lightly crushed

0.5c glace cherries, halved.

 

METHOD:

Preheat oven to 200oC. Line tray with baking paper.

 

Sift flour, baking powder and salt together.

 

Cream butter, sugar and vanilla, then add in the honey and egg and beat until combined.

 

Mix in sifted flour mixture alternately with milk until of an even consistency.

 

Roll tablespoons of the dough in the crushed cornflakes and place on tray. Gently press a glace cherry on top.

 

Bake for around 10 minutes, or until golden.

 

Eat 12,086,473,493 of them because you enjoy the subtle honey taste and the light crunch of the corn flakes so much!

Sorry that this is the only picture I have of them - I had a spectacular one on my iPhone of them all cooling on racks, row upon row, but my phone died two Sundays ago and took with it to its grave a lot of photos that I am quite sad to lose :( I still haven't even figured out if I will get my music back (although I'm sure that given I bought most of it from iTunes, straight to my phone, there must be a record of me having purchased it). There's a valuable lesson in that - back up your iPhone!

Lastly, an Australian tablespoon (tbsp) is traditionally 20mL where the rest of the world satisfies itself with a mere 15mL. So if you're using an American or British tablespoon and the mixture seems a little dry, it's probably because it's missing 10mL of milk and 5mL of honey.