Wednesday 24 December 2014

Almond Coffee Crisps

I love Christmas time for many reasons, many of them related to childhood nostalgia I suspect, but also for the opportunities for baking and cooking special dishes. These biscuits fall squarely into the special category, being quite unusual in texture and flavour.

This post will have to be short and sweet (haha) since I'm away from home and working from my iPad. I made these biscuits a week or so ago but Christmas travel and general busy-ness got in the way of posting about them.


This recipe calls for instant coffee powder.  I couldn't find the recommended brand but Google recommended a similar one I could find in the supermarket. Unfortunately it wasn't powdery so I decided in the pursuit of accuracy to whiz it into a powder.


The dough is made by grinding almonds into a meal and adding it to creamed butter and sugar. It's a fairly simple process although my dough came out fairly wet. I was going to say that I added a little bit more flour to it but actually in all the hecticness I can't remember if I did or not.


I refrigerated the dough as instructed but I could have left it for longer since it was pretty sticky when I got it out to roll out into balls. I pressed on under time restrictions and it wasn't too messy to roll into balls. The flattening was a bit trickier, with the little disks sticking to my hand, the glass I used to flatten them, my finger....etc. I used a bit of water to stop it sticking to the glass but I wouldn't recommend it since some of the biscuits became 'water damaged'.


Happily most of them came out quite well. And I dusted the first few with coffee powder when they came out of the oven as the recipe instructs. I then tased one which did not go well. I thought they were terribly bitter and that I must have done something wrong (sigh). I didn't brush any more with coffee powder and when I tried one the next dayit was lovely. I think the difference was a nights' sleep and no coffee powder on my fingers(!), as well as leaving the coffee powder off the top.


These are lovely biscuits, thin and crispy with a lovely coffee flavour. I had to put them in the freezer but I think they'd be lovely in an Eton Mess type desert with cream and fruit. I look forward to trying it when I'm back from hols.

Happy Christmas to those who celebrate this time of year and best wishes to everyone for the new year.

1 comment:

  1. Glad you were able to post the cookies - love the idea of using them to make Eton Mess!

    Patricia @ ButterYum
    http://www.butteryum.org/roses-alpha-bakers/2014/11/6/tbb-almond-coffee-crisps

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