Shortbread Cookies “Green Apples”

Send

Bake for evening tea or a glass of juice for an afternoon snack here are such unusual and very interesting cookies in the form of apples! And next to this, put the sliced real apples: let the household be surprised! It will turn out a great dessert: even if shortbread cookies and high-calorie enough, but homemade guaranteed better than bought. Although there are no apples in the Green Apples shortcake, we will use only natural ingredients for its preparation: high-quality butter, not margarine, and vegetable dye instead of artificial.

To color the dough in the original apple-biscuit recipe, Japanese green tea called “Matcha” is used (but the correct pronunciation is “Matcha”, which means “ground tea”). Matcha looks like a green powder. It is he who appears in the classic Japanese tea ceremony, and is also added to the local wagashi sweets and ice cream. But, since Matcha tea is quite expensive, and you can not buy it in any store, we will replace the original ingredient with a more affordable one - spinach!

Spinach leaves - an excellent natural dye, when added to the dough, giving the products a beautiful green color of varying degrees of saturation. Depending on the amount of spinach, the color turns out to be light salad or bright emerald. By adding mashed spinach, you can color the dough for biscuits, noodles, homemade bread. Also, other greens are suitable as green dyes: parsley, dill. But these aromatic herbs are best used for snack recipes - such as garlic-dill bread, buns with cheese and herbs. And spinach is ideal for both salty and sweet dishes - its taste is neutral.

Time for preparing: 2 hours
Servings Per Container: 20-25

Ingredients for Shortcrust Cookies “Green Apples”

For shortcrust pastry:

100 g spinach;
2 medium-sized yolks;
150 g sugar + 3 tbsp. l for sprinkling;
150 g butter;
350 g flour + 1.5 tbsp. l .;
1 tbsp lemon zest;
2 hours baking powder;
1/8 teaspoon of salt;
vanillin on the tip of a teaspoon;
1.5 tbsp. ice water.

To design cookies in the form of apples:

50 pcs. cloves;
50 pcs. chocolate drops.

The method of preparation of shortbread cookies "Green apples"

We take dough oil from the refrigerator in advance to soften. And water, on the contrary, needs to be cooled.

Wash the lemon and pour boiling water to remove the bitter taste of the zest.

Before you do the test, you need to prepare spinach. Both fresh and frozen will do. If you use frozen, then pour it with boiling water for a couple of minutes, then squeeze it carefully.

If it’s fresh, then first we dip the greens in cold water to soak the soil that has stuck to the leaves. After 4-5 minutes, rinse them well in running water.

Dip the spinach in boiling water so that it covers the leaves, and boil for 1 minute, no more. This is enough to make it soft, and if you digest, then the greens will lose their bright color and become a swamp hue.

We discard the boiled spinach in a colander and wait until the water drains and the greens have cooled and it can be picked up.

Very carefully we squeeze out excess moisture. As a result, you will get a small spinach lump weighing 40-50 g - the volume is much smaller than the original bunch. This is enough for a portion of the test.

Now - the most time-consuming of the cooking steps: wipe the spinach with a spoon through a sieve to get a gentle puree that will be distributed evenly in the dough. If you have a good blender, you can try mashed spinach with it. But still rubbing through a sieve, although it requires more labor and time, gives a better result: the dough does not go out into a green speck, but of a uniform color.

This is spinach puree.

Now it's time to knead the shortbread dough. Separate the yolks from the proteins. Egg whites are useful for scrambled eggs or meringues. Pour sugar over the yolks and beat for 1-2 minutes with a mixer.

Add soft butter to the whipped yolks.

And again, beat the mixture until a homogeneous, lush mass is obtained.

Sift the flour, combined with the baking powder, into the oil mixture. Salt, add vanillin and lemon zest.

Grind the components of the dough with your hands into a large crumb.

Separate a quarter or a little less than a third of the dough and put in a separate bowl.

Add the spinach puree to the smaller portion of the dough and mix.

Since when adding wet mashed potatoes the dough becomes sticky, then pour 1-1.5 tbsp. flour. And knead the green dough, collecting it into a lump.

And in the white dough, on the contrary, we add 1-1.5 tbsp. cold water so that it ceases to crumble and also gathers in a ball.

Roll green dough between two sheets of parchment (so as not to stick to the table and the rolling pin) into a rectangle about 18x25 cm in size, 3-4 mm thick.

Remove the parchment. From a white dough we form a sausage of the same length as a green layer, and place it in the middle of the cake.

Raising the edge of the parchment, tightly wrap a white sausage with green cake. Then in the same way we wrap the second edge. We pinch the joint. And we roll the sausage on the table back and forth, so that the layers of dough are firmly pressed against each other, and the cookies do not further separate.

Sprinkle paper with sugar and roll the sausage back and forth again. Wrap tightly in parchment and place in the refrigerator for 1 hour.

After this time, turn on the oven to warm up to 170 ° C. Cover the baking sheet with a sheet of parchment paper. We prepare two saucers: with cloves and with chocolate for decoration.

Having taken the workpiece, we cut the sausage into round pieces 1 cm thick.

Each circle is slightly pressed with fingers above and below. We insert along the clove: below - the bud out, and on top - the tail out.

Insert the chocolate "seeds" into the dough.

We spread the cookies on a baking sheet, leaving 3-4 cm between them: during the baking process, the “apples” grow up.

Bake at an average oven level at 170 ° C for 25-30 minutes. Do not overdo the cookie: when dried, the shortbread dough becomes hard. Therefore, be careful: the dough should remain light, except to get a little bit of gold. Carefully, so as not to get burned, try pressing the dough with your finger: if it is already dry, there are no dents left, but it’s still a little soft, it’s time to get it. You can check with a skewer, the criteria are the same: the dough inside is dry, but not hard, but a little soft. When cooling, the cookies harden - consider this when baking.

In order not to break the hot shortcrust pastry, let the cookies carefully and the parchment slide out of the pan onto the table. Let cool on a flat surface.

We spread the “Green Apples” shortbread cookies on saucers and invite home-made ones to be surprised and try!