Due to the fact that I'm invited to not one but two Christmas parties, I decided to bake some Christmas cookies. As @erodedthoughts never fails to remind me, I suck at baking. I'm a great cook but baking ... ugh. Luckily, generations of lazy people had the same problem so there are plenty of recipes for easy cookies. In my case, I chose to bake "Engelsaugen" (translates to "Angel's eyes", if that isn't christmas-y I don't know what is).
The original recipe calls for 300g flour, 200g margarine (I'm sure you can use butter too, but I have a friend with a milk protein allergy and don't want to kill her), 100g sugar, 2 packages of vanilla sugar (each about 7g), one egg, a pinch of salt and raspberry jam. I decided to make two batches.
Put the margarine, sugar, vanilla sugar and salt in a big (big) bowl and mix.
Add the flour and eggs
Mix into a nice dough:
Then take small amounts of dough, roll them into earth-shaped spheres and place them onto a sheet of baking paper. Frighten your kids by telling them they can't have any dough because they will literally die of salmonella, wait till they're back in their rooms, crying, then eat some dough yourself.
Find a kitchen utensil with a flat, round part that is a bit smaller than your proto-cookies and make dents into them. Please don't punch holes through the dough!
At this stage, they always remind me of red blood cells. Did you know that red blood cells look the way they do because they lose their nucleus during their development? Yes? Alright, let's move on.
If you're anything like me, you don't own most baking utensils. Especially not a pastry bag. But who needs that, anyway? Just take a small freezer bag, put a good amount of the raspberry jam in it, cut off the tip and then fill up those cookies!
Then put them in the preheated oven at about 180°C (air circulation). For how long? I don't know, 10 minutes I guess. I just keep an eye on them and take them out when they start turning slightly brown. They shouldn't become too dark!
Repeat those steps until you either hate yourself or the dough is empty.
The result will be a nearly sufficient amount of delicious Christmas cookies that taste so great while they're still warm ...
