In honour of International Woman’s Day (8th March) – not to be confused with our South African National Women’s Day on the 9th August – I decided to write a blog about cookies.
Yum!
My mum has this incredibly easy recipe that I thought I’d share with you. Just make sure that you get your parental agent to help you out when using the oven please.
This is what you need for the basic sugar dough recipe:
125gm margarine (that’s a quarter of a block)
1 cup sugar (white or brown)
1 egg
2 cups of flour
Pinch of salt
Teaspoon of vanilla essence.
Heat the oven to 180oC.
Melt the margarine in the micro (or leave it out of the fridge for a while until it gets nice and soft). Add the sugar, salt and vanilla essence and mix it all up.
Crack in the egg and stir it well. Lastly, you add the flour and mix it all up together.
Using a teaspoon (or you can roll the dough into little balls in your hands if you don’t mind getting a bit sticky) drop small amounts onto a well-greased cookie tray.
Gently flatten the top of the cookies with a fork. (Sometimes it works better if you put the fork into a cup of hot water first.) You should get at least 24 cookies out of this mixture.
Pop the tray into the oven (this is the bit where you might need an adult to help you – don’t burn yourself – remember the oven is hot!)
When they are cooked and you take them out of the oven – let the cookies stand on the tray for a little while before you transfer them onto a wire rack to cool down properly. If you move them too soon they may break or crumble.
You can also do variations of this recipe – add a cup of coconut, crushed peanuts (just put a handful or two into a small bag and bash them with a rolling pin), two spoonfuls’ of peanut butter or if you want chocolate biscuits – add two tablespoons of cocoa powder to the basic recipe. If your mixture gets a bit dry you can always use 2 eggs instead of 1. If it’s too wet – add a bit more flour.
Once you get good at baking tasty cookies you could always sell them at school markets, or make extra-special ones for birthday presents to give to the people that you love.
Happy baking,
Sibo