Dark Chocolate Cookie Shards Recipe

I love this Venetian mask. I've had it for about fifteen years, with never an occasion to wear it. I need someone to arrange a masqued ball for me. Then I would stick this on my head and bring along these dark, decadent chocolate cookie shards as a gift for the host. Maybe I should just arrange one for myself. Or perhaps it would be simpler just to make the cookies, wear the mask and eat them. No need for guests or anything fussy like that.




















I'm not overly keen on very sweet cookies, especially with the intense sugariness of the icing, so my intention was to create something rich and dark, but that would still be tasty for children and adults alike. To that end I enlisted my eight year old daughter and her little friend as chief taste testers, and somehow my husband enrolled himself on the programme. Frankly I was lucky to get these photographs taken whilst there were still some left.

These cookies are very simple to make, decorate, and eat. You can fantasize about putting delicate pieces out with coffee at your masqued ball, but really what people will want is large pieces and lots of them. I think that's the perfect definition of a successful amuse-bouche: something your guests really want more of but are too embarrassed to ask, so you get to keep most of it for yourself after they've all gone home.

This recipe starts with my basic shortbread style vanilla cookie, but omitting the vanilla, and replacing some of the cornflour with cocoa. You might want to omit the salt according to taste, but personally I think it's essential to add the richness these cookies need. The recipe assumes the cookies will be coated with royal icing to balance out the flavour. I also add a little salt to the water I make my royal icing with, to give it a richer taste (about 1 teaspoon per 100ml water).

Ingredients:

NB I always weigh out in grams, but I've converted the quantities as best I can to ounces and cups for flexibility.

For the cookies:
250g butter, softened (9oz, or 1 cup, or 2 1/4 sticks)
170g powdered or icing sugar (6oz or 1 1/3 cups)
1 egg, lightly beaten
385g plain or all purpose flour (13 5/8oz or 3 cups)
60g cocoa powder (2oz or 1/2 cup)
40g cornflour (1 2/5 oz or 1/3 cup)
2 teaspoons salt

For the decoration:
Stiff black royal icing
Offset spatula
Gold edible paint
Broad food-use only paintbrush

Sift and mix the flour, cocoa, cornflour and salt and set aside. Gently mix the butter and sugar until thoroughly incorporated but do not cream (to reduce spreading of the cookies whilst baking). Add the egg and a spoon of the dry ingredients. Once the egg is mixed in, set the mixer on low, and add the remains of the dry ingredients a spoon at a time until the dough pulls together. Split the dough into two pieces, form rough discs, and wrap in cling film. Chill the dough in the fridge for half an hour (I don't like rolling out really cold, stiff dough, it's too much work), then roll out between parchment or in large food-safe bags to a thickness of around 4mm. Seal the bags (or thoroughly wrap in cling film) and place overnight in the freezer.

Preheat the oven to 155c fan (310F or Gas mark 3). Unwrap one sheet of the frozen dough, and allow to soften at room temperature for about 5 minutes. Using a sharp knife (I use a scalpel) cut all the frilly broken edges off and eat set aside for re-rolling. You can use a ruler if you want to keep the edges perfectly straight. Pay no attention to making the edges neat and tidy. Cut random 'shards' from the rest of the dough, some large, some small. If your shards are very varied in size, seperate smaller and larger sizes onto seperate trays.

Bake for about 8 minutes, remove from the oven and smooth down the surfaces of the cookies with a fondant smoother, tin lid or other flat surface, being careful not to burn yourself! Pop the cookies back in the oven for a further 10 to 15 minutes, depending on size.

Mix up your black royal icing - you can use a chocolate based recipe if you like, such as this one from Lilaloa, if you want to avoid using too much black colouring. I've found Americolor to be great for creating deep colour whilst still drying hard, but some people find it has an artificial taste. Sugarflair black doesn't seem to have an aftertaste, but I find a really deep black icing won't dry truly hard with Sugarflair, though that's not necessarily a problem with this sort of cookie.

Spread the icing on each cookie shard with the spatula, taking care not to get icing over the edges. Allow to dry thoroughly, overnight. Paint  splashes of edible gold on each cookie. Don't be too neat. I used Rainbow Dust Edible Metallic Paint in Light Gold as I love the way it dries with a non-smudge shiny surface, but you could mix up some gold lustre dust with vodka or alcohol-based essence and use that.

Finally arrange an exclusive dinner for a few special guests, with or without masks, and serve small shards of these cookies with espresso at the end of the meal. Once your guests have left, get your pyjamas on and scoff all the large pieces you kept back.

 

Cookiesaw! A Cookie Garden Jigsaw Puzzle

I wish to introduce a new word to the cookie lexicon: 'cookiesaw'. It's definitely a thing: a cookie array that fits together like a jigsaw, or even using cutters shaped like traditional jigsaw pieces. If I use the word often enough, I shall force it into the cookie consciousness. I have already been hashtagging it all over Instagram like someone who really ought to be a little more embarrassed by the way she behaves in public.

Anyway, I was really excited about this project from the moment I was asked to do it. A cookie set for a jigsaw and gardening enthusiast, to take the place of a cake at his birthday party. All the design elements were requested: greenhouse, favourite plants and ducks, gardening tools, I just had to figure out how to put it all together.

As usual, when something like this comes my way, I do most of my planning as I'm falling asleep, until by the time I have to start making it, I really only do a few small sketches. In fact for this project I scribbled two thumbnails. This sort of design kind of forms itself as I'm piping to be honest.

One other aspect kept me occupied as much as the design though, and that was how to create a jigsaw with enough intricacy, where the pieces fit together tightly. My cookie recipe is a light, crisp shortbread style biscuit (recipe here and cookie baking tips here) but does spread just a little. Not enough to worry about usually but when the shapes need to fit tightly it can be a problem. With this dinosaur cookiesaw I used my microplane, but its flat surface meant I had to keep the curves fairly shallow. So after a little googling I came up with a six inch, coarse 'bastard cut' file much like this one, though searching on ebay will throw up much cheaper options.

It's a small, round, coarse file presumably intended for metal or woodwork. It was cheap and very rough, and perfect. (I did of course give it a long soapy soak, a thorough scrub, and dried off in a hot oven to ensure it was safe for food use first!). In fact it worked even better than I hoped. I simply used it to 'carve' the curves here and there, constantly adjusting and testing until all the pieces fit as tightly as I could make it.

A plain base of white flood, carefully piped right to the edges of the cookies, and I was ready to go.

I didn't take a photograph of the painted base layer unfortunately, but I came to do it just as Sugar Pearls Bakes and Cakes published her final Cookie Connection tutorial, and it was the techniques in her tutorial I used to create the background colour, including the small drops of vodka, which is really effective! I simply used a large brush and moved from light blue down to dark green, dabbing and mottling, and adding further layers where necessary.

I only had to mix two colours of icing - light green and orange! The behind the scenes moments when I'm most proud of my planning skills usually involve keeping mixing to an absolute minimum. I reckoned I could get all the greens I wanted with that one base plus handpainting on top, and the whole variety of tomato colour starting with the orange icing.

I used a pico projector to pipe the greenhouse shape, but everything else was done by eye. I had a collection of photographs of the specified plants and ducks to refer to, and an idea for where I wanted the actual flowers, trusting that the foliage could be piped around to draw the whole design together.

When it came to painting, again I referred to the photographs of flowers, but I tried to ensure that each colour would complement the ones on either side. So obviously starting with red and orange tomatoes, I followed with yellow irises, then peachy-pink roses, deep rose pink camellias with violet aquilegias sprouting through them. The magnolias I kept pale against the sky.

I used the same painting technique as in my Robin cookie video: starting with basic blocks of pale colour, blending and adding darker, finer elements on top. I finished with a few garden tools here and there, subtle, blending into the background.

And then came the best bit - I had made royal icing transfers of bees, ladybirds and butterflies which I attached with enough RI 'glue' to give a little 'lift' so these elements were slightly raised. I usually ship my cookies so have to avoid doing this, so it was lovely to be able to add a third dimension to this set. A simple border of gold rectangular cookies, with one or two stray insects finished off the project.