Shortbread Cookies "Green Apples". Apple Cookies. Step-by-step Recipe With Photo

2023 Author: Ava Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-11-27 07:13

Bake such unusual and very interesting cookies in the form of apples for evening tea or a glass of juice for an afternoon snack! And next to it, put real apples cut into circles: let the household be surprised! You will get an excellent dessert: even if shortbread cookies are quite high in calories, homemade ones are guaranteed better than purchased ones. Although Green Apples shortbread cookies do not contain apples, we will use only natural ingredients for their preparation: high-quality butter, not margarine, and vegetable dye instead of artificial.

The original apple cookie recipe used a Japanese green tea called "Matcha" to color the dough (but the correct pronunciation is "Matcha", which means "grated tea"). Matcha looks like a green powder. It is he who appears in the classic Japanese tea ceremony, and is also added to the local sweets "wagashi" and ice cream. But, since Matcha tea is quite expensive, and it is not possible to buy it in any store, we will replace the original ingredient with a more affordable one - spinach!

Spinach leaves are an excellent natural dye that, when added to the dough, gives the products a beautiful green color of varying degrees of saturation. Depending on the amount of spinach, the color is light salad or bright emerald. By adding spinach puree, you can color the dough for biscuits, noodles, homemade bread. Other greens are also suitable as green dyes: parsley, dill. But these fragrant herbs are best used for snack recipes such as garlic dill bread, cheese rolls and herbs. And spinach is ideal for both salty and sweet dishes - its taste is neutral.

• Cooking time: 2 hours
• Number of Servings: 20-25

Ingredients for Green Apples shortbread cookies

For shortcrust pastry:

• 100 g spinach;
• 2 medium yolks;
• 150 g sugar + 3 tbsp. l. for sprinkling;
• 150 g butter;
• 350 g flour + 1.5 tbsp. l.;
• 1 tbsp lemon zest;
• 2 tsp baking powder;
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• vanillin on the tip of a teaspoon;
• 1.5 tbsp. l. ice water.

To decorate apple cookies:

• 50 pcs. carnations;
• 50 pcs. chocolate drops.

Method for preparing shortbread cookies "Green apples"

We take out the butter for the dough from the refrigerator in advance to soften. And the water, on the contrary, needs to be cooled.

Wash the lemon and pour boiling water over it to remove the bitter taste of the zest.

Before doughing, you need to prepare the spinach. Both fresh and frozen will do. If you use frozen, then fill it with boiling water for a couple of minutes, then squeeze thoroughly.

If fresh, then first we dip the greens in cold water to soak the earth adhering to the leaves. After 4-5 minutes, rinse them well in running water.

Dip the spinach in boiling water so that it covers the leaves, and boil for 1 minute, no more. This is enough for it to become soft, and if you digest it, the greens will lose their bright color and become a swampy hue.

We put the boiled spinach in a colander and wait for the water to drain and the greens to cool down and can be picked up.

We squeeze out excess moisture very carefully. As a result, you will have a small spinach lump weighing 40-50 g - much smaller in volume than the original bunch. This is enough for a portion of dough.

Now - the most time-consuming of the cooking stages: rub the spinach with a spoon through a sieve to get a delicate puree that is evenly distributed in the dough. If you have a good blender, you can try mashed spinach with it. Still, rubbing through a sieve, although it requires more work and time, gives the best result: the dough does not come out with a green speck, but a uniform color.

This is how spinach puree turns out.

Now it's time to knead the shortbread dough. Let's separate the yolks from the whites. Egg whites come in handy for an omelet or meringue. And add sugar to the yolks and beat with a mixer for 1-2 minutes.

Add soft butter to the whipped yolks.

And beat the mixture again until a homogeneous fluffy mass is obtained.

Sift flour combined with baking powder into the oil mixture. Salt, add vanillin and lemon zest.

Grind the dough components with our hands into large crumbs.

Separate a quarter or slightly less than a third of the dough and place in a separate bowl.

Add spinach puree to a smaller part of the dough and stir.

Since when adding wet puree the dough becomes sticky, add 1-1.5 tbsp. l. flour. And we knead the green dough, collecting it into a lump.

And in the white dough, on the contrary, add 1-1.5 tbsp. l. cold water so that it stops crumbling and also gathers in a ball.

Roll out the green dough between two sheets of parchment (so as not to stick to the table and rolling pin) into a rectangle about 18x25 cm in size, 3-4 mm thick.

We remove the parchment. From the white dough, form a sausage of the same length as the green layer, and place it in the middle of the cake.

Raising the edge of the parchment, tightly wrap the white sausage with a green crust. Then we wrap the second edge in the same way. We pinch the joint. And we roll the sausage back and forth on the table, so that the layers of dough are tightly pressed against each other, and the cookies do not delaminate in the future.

Sprinkle sugar on the paper and roll the sausage back and forth again. Wrap tightly in parchment and place in the refrigerator for 1 hour.

After this time, we turn on the oven to heat up to 170 ° C. Cover the baking sheet with a sheet of parchment paper. We prepare two saucers: with cloves and with chocolate for decoration.

Having taken out the workpiece, we cut the sausage into round pieces 1 cm thick.

Each circle is slightly pressed with your fingers above and below. Insert on the clove: at the bottom - with the bud outward, and on top - outward with the tail.

Insert the chocolate "seeds" into the dough.

We spread the cookies on a baking sheet, leaving 3-4 cm between them: during the baking process, the "apples" grow.

We bake on the medium level of the oven at 170 ° C for 25-30 minutes. Do not overexpose the cookies: when overdried, the shortbread dough becomes hard. Therefore, be careful: the dough should remain light, perhaps slightly golden. Gently, so as not to burn yourself, try to press the dough with your finger: if it is already dry, there are no dents, but at the same time it is still a little soft, - it's time to get it out. You can check with a skewer, the criteria are the same: the dough inside is dry, but not hard, but a little soft. As they cool, the cookies will harden - keep this in mind when baking.

In order not to break the hot shortbread dough, let the cookies and parchment carefully slide down from the baking sheet onto the table. Let it cool on a flat surface.

We spread the Green Apples shortbread cookies on saucers and invite your family to be surprised and try!