Baking Season.

I've been sharing a seasonal baking recipe every year for a few years now, and I can see the day coming when I will run out of recipes... as while I have about a dozen different cookies on the plate when the baking spree is all finished, five of the dozen are made from the same basic cookie dough, only turning into different contraptions by filling and topping them.

So here you go - the basic cookie dough that I use:

500 g flour (wheat or spelt)
250 g butter
120 g sugar
1 pinch of salt
2 egg yolks
1 pck vanilla sugar

Make a mound out of the flour, sugar, salt and vanilla sugar; cut or crumble in the cold butter until it is finely mixed in with the flour. Mound the mixture up again, make a well in the middle, put in the egg yolks. Quickly knead together until it forms a solid ball of dough; it should not stick to your hands anymore. (The original recipe called for 250g sugar, which makes them very, very sweet. If you prefer your cookies even less sweet, you can cut down the sugar a little more.)

Let it rest in a cool place for at least one hour - though it can stay in the fridge for a few days as well (won't hurt it).

Roll out, cut out cookies, and bake them for about 6 minutes at 170°C in a convector oven.

I roll the dough out very thinly, about 1.5-2 mm thin, and it takes exactly 6 mins in our oven for the edges to just start turning golden - that's when I take them out.

I leave some plain, some are filled with praliné and topped with chocolate, some are filled with red currant jelly and topped with chocolate, and some are topped with praliné and a layer of marzipan. (Roll out the marzipan on a bed of powdered sugar, cut with the wrong side of the cookie cutter you used for the cookies, and stick on with melted praliné.) I also have a sheep-formed cookie cutter, and these get a choc or praliné cover on their bodies, where the wooly bits are, then are dunked in ground nuts or almonds to make them fluffy.

Voilá - five different types of cookies from one batch of dough.

The other seasonal recipes that I blogged in the past are:

• Lemon Lozenges
• Chocolate-Coffee-Nut Spheroids
• Schokogongs (Chocolate THINGS) and how to make the praliné for filling them
• Marzipan-stuffed dates
• Gingerbread, without flour (Nuremberg type)