Almond Cookies

Among the many new year cookies, one of my favourite has to be almond cookies. I find that there are so many forms of almond cookies that I am always eager to try any types that is labelled "almond cookies" whenever I walk past shops selling new year goodies, without buying of course. :P

I have been making this almond cookie over the past few cny and even during non-chinese new year period because it is really delicious and crunchy. This year, I wanted to venture into new almond cookie recipes. I recently bought Oi Lin's recipe books on Delicious Asian Baked Treats and Delicious Asian Sweet Treats which features loads of Asian treats such as your usual pineapple tarts, egg sponge cakes, cny cookies and many more. I wanted to try most of the new year cookie recipes in her book but I only managed to try some of them his year. This is one of the almond cookie that I've tried from her book. The result is rich and crumbly and certainly worth making. This is similar to the one I've been making but it uses a mixture of almond meal and flour while the other (originated from Florence's blog) uses only flour but with lots of toasted almond nips. I actually prefer Florence's recipe because the almond nips makes the cookies extra crunchy!

The other almond cookie from Oi Lin's Asian Baked Treats is this almond cookie with nut topping. This recipe uses ghee instead of the usual butter or oil. Intially I was quite skeptical about using ghee because I always thought this is much more unhealthier, until I did a googling and understands that ghee is actually clarified butter, where the milk solids and impurities have already been removed. It is however not explicitly clear whether ghee has any difference (if any) in terms of its health benefits as compared to butter although some sites do claim that ghee is healthier than butter because of its lower fat content.

Mixing the batter of this was so easy because ghee is much softer. You literally just need to mix the ghee with sugar and salt well and fold in the other ingredients as you would usually do when making a standard cookie batter. The ghee smelt rather pungent and I was so worried that no one would dare to eat it but hey I'm wrong!

When baked, the cookie was so fragrant, once you pop a small morsel with an almond into your mouth, you just can't stop!

almond cookies with nut topping

• 120g untoasted whole almonds with skin
• 100g ground almonds
• 180g unsalted ghee
• 130g caster sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 250g plain flour
• Glaze: 1 egg yolk mixed with a few drops of water
• small paper cases

1. Preheat oven to 180°C.
2. Toast whole almonds for 10 minutes and ground almonds for 5 minutes. Set aside to cool.
3. Mix ghee, sugar, salt and vanilla essence. Add cooled (must be cooled) ground almonds and mix well. Sift flour over the ghee mixture. Fold the flour into the mixture and bring all ingredients to form a dough.
4. Scoop one level teaspoon of dough, shape it into a ball and place n a paper case. Arrange on a baking tray. (according to Oi Lin, these cookies must be baked in small paper cases. Otherwise the cookies will spread and result in thin and hard cookies)
5. Bake cookies in preheated oen at 180°C for 10 minutes. Remove tray from the oven and glaze the cookies with egg yolk. Place a whole almond on every cookie. Bake for another 10 minues. (Note, you should place the almond immediately once you glaze the top. Otherwise if yu glaze all the cookies at one time, the earlier ones that you have glazed would have dried up and the almond would not stick into the cookie.
6. Allow cookies to cool completely on a wire rack before storing.

Recipe from: Oi Lin's "Delicious Asian Baked Treats"