Blogmas day 18!

Today I have decided to do something very different. Over this past weekend I have been baking some festive treats for my family. The cookies that I cooked are called 'Sparkling vanilla christmas cookies'.

 1. First things first you need to get out all of the ingredients.

• - 140g icing sugar, sieved
• - 1 tsp vanilla extract
• - 1 egg yolk
• - 250g butter, cut into small cubes
• - 375g plain flour, sieved

 Then you mix together the Icing flour, Vanilla essence, egg yolk and butter until it is smooth.

Finally you need to add the flour to the mix to form a dough. 

Once you have the dough you need to kneed it until it is thick and split it into two. This then needs to be flattened and wrapped in cling film. Place the two pieces of dough in the fridge for about 20-30 minutes to harden a little. 

 While waiting for the dough to harden you need to pre heat the oven to 190c/ fan 170/ gas 5. You can also line two baking sheets with non stick greaseproof paper.

You can also dust a surface in flour in preparation of rolling out the dough. 

 Once the 30 minutes is up you need to roll out the dough and choose whichever christmas cookie cutters that you want to use. I decided to use a small star, Bell, Snowman and holly. The dough needs to be rolled out to about two pound coins on top of each other. Once you cut them out these need to be placed on top of the greaseproof paper. This needs to be placed in the oven for 12 minutes, or until the top of the cookie is golden brown.

Once they have come out of the oven place on a cooling rack and enjoy! 

You can add some icing to the top of the cookies but I thought that they were perfect the way that they are. They taste gorgeous and are perfect with a coffee/tea/hot chocolate.

Let me know whether you made these cookies and I would love to see the results on your blog!

xoxox

The recipe I followed was from (http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2798/sparkling-vanilla-christmas-cookies)  although I adapted it slightly.