(Recipe taken from this blogpost)
We’re currently in the midst of Chinese New Year and unfortunately, we haven’t gotten into the spirit this year. Apart from a good clean of the house and yee sang on the eve, we’ve gone about our lives in a distinctly non-Chinese fashion. Which is absolutely fine. Until you see other people’s Facebook photos showcasing their my-dining-table-is-going-to-collapse-with-the-weight-of-all-this-food festive feasts.
Anyway. I was trawling for recipes on the weekend, and stumbled across a recipe for peanut cookies in the TMX. Peanut cookies, along with pineapple jam tarts, are two of the best things about Chinese New Year! And after a quick glance at the ingredients and process, it looked way too easy to not give it a go.
Ingredients
300g toasted peanuts
250g raw sugar (I used 180g)
150g peanut oil or other vegetable oil (I used a vegetable oil blend I had in the cupboard)
250g plain flour
1 tsp fine salt
Before we go into the steps, I should tell you that while the taste was more or less right, my batter came out way too sticky to mould into nice little round balls, even after I added a fair amount of extra flour. You’ll soon see that my shapes look NOTHING like the picture in the recipe link! Could the reduction in sugar have had something to do with it? And for some reason, the taste of oil was fairly strong in the cookie. I wonder if using peanut oil would have been better? Questions, questions.
Method
- Toast peanuts in a dry frying pan without oil, then grind it in the TMX bowl for 5-6 seconds/speed 9.
- Preheat oven to 200 degrees celcius.
- Add sugar, flour and salt to ground peanuts. Mix for 3-4 seconds/speed 6 until well combined.
- Reduce to speed 3, then slowly drizzle oil through opening until the cookie dough looks pliable but not sticky. (Maybe this is where I went wrong!)
Yes, yes, I know. Metal spoon in TMX bowl? DEADLY SIN. I realised as soon as I took the photo, and used a spatula instead.
Now, here’s where you need to pop spoonfuls of mixture in your palms, and then deftly roll said mixture into fancy, equal shaped balls that you place on a greased baking tray.
No matter what I did, the mixture would just not stay in a fancy, equal shaped ball! So I popped what I could do into the oven for 20 minutes (a bit too long, 15 minutes would have been better.)
I present to you…
Mini peanut pancake cookies.
Clearly, further practice is required.
Tasted good, though!
Thermomixin' it up! 