Bake for an evening tea or a glass of juice for afternoon tea, these are unusual and very interesting cookies in the form of apples! And next put the sliced real apples: let the family be surprised! It will make an excellent dessert: let the shortbread biscuits and quite high-calorie, but homemade is guaranteed to be better than the purchased one. Although there are no apples in the “Green Apples” shortbread, we will use only natural ingredients for its preparation: high-quality butter, not margarine, and vegetable coloring instead of artificial.
Japanese green tea, called “Matcha,” is used to color the dough in the original apple-biscuit recipe (but the correct pronunciation is “Matcha”, which means “ground tea” in translation). Matcha looks like a green powder. It is he who appears in the classic Japanese tea ceremony, as well as added to the local sweets “vagasi” and ice cream. But, since Matcha tea is quite expensive, and you cannot buy it at any store, we will replace the original ingredient with a more affordable one - spinach!
Spinach leaves - an excellent natural dye, 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 obtained gently lettuce or bright emerald. Adding mashed spinach, you can paint the dough for biscuits, noodles, homemade bread. Also, greens are suitable as green dyes: parsley, dill. But these fragrant herbs are best used for snack recipes - such as garlic-dill bread, buns with cheese and greens. Spinach is ideal for both salty and sweet dishes - its taste is neutral.
- Cooking time: 2 hours
- Servings: 20-25
Ingredients for “Green Apples” Shortbread Cookies
For short pastry:
- 100 g of spinach;
- 2 medium yolks;
- 150 g sugar + 3 tbsp. l for sprinkling;
- 150 g butter;
- 350 g flour + 1, 5 tbsp. l .;
- 1 tbsp. l lemon peel;
- 2 tsp. baking powder;
- 1/8 teaspoon salt;
- vanilla on the tip of a teaspoon;
- 1, 5 tbsp. l ice water.
For decoration of cookies in the form of apples:
- 50 pcs. carnations;
- 50 pcs. chocolate drops.
How to make Green Apples Shortbread Cookies
We get the dough oil out of the fridge in advance to soften it. And the water, on the contrary, needs to be cooled.
Lemon wash and fill with boiling water to remove the bitter taste of zest.
Before practicing dough, you need to prepare spinach. Both fresh and frozen. If you use frozen, then pour it with boiling water for a couple of minutes, then carefully squeeze.
If it is fresh, then first we put the greens in cold water to soak off the ground adhering to the leaves. After 4-5 minutes, wash them well in running water.
Dip the spinach in boiling water so that it covers the leaves, and boil for 1 minute, not more. This is enough for it to become soft, and if it is digested, the green will lose its bright color and become a swamp hue.
Put the cooked spinach in a colander and wait until the water is drained and the greens cool and can be picked up.
Very carefully we squeeze out excess moisture. As a result, you will get a small spinach ball weighing 40-50 g - much smaller in volume than the original bundle. This is enough for a portion of the test.
Now - the most time-consuming of the cooking steps: we wipe the spinach with a spoon through a sieve to get a gentle puree, which will be distributed evenly in the dough. If you have a good blender, you can try mashing spinach with it. Still, wiping through a sieve, although it requires more work and time, gives the best result: the dough does not come out in a green speck, but in a uniform color.
Here is a spinach puree.
Now it's time to knead the shortbread dough. Separate the yolks from proteins. Egg whites will 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 whipped yolks.
And again beat the mixture until a homogeneous fluffy mass.
Sift flour into the oil mixture, combined with baking powder. Salt, add vanilla and lemon zest.
We grind the components of the dough with our hands into a large crumb.
Separate a quarter or a little less than a third of the dough and put in a separate dish.
To a smaller part of the dough, add the spinach puree and mix.
Since adding the wet mashed potatoes makes the dough sticky, pour 1-1,5 tbsp. l flour. And knead the green dough, collecting it into a ball.
And in the white dough, by contrast, pour 1-1, 5 tbsp. l cold water so that it ceases to crumble and also collected in a ball.
Roll out the green dough between two sheets of parchment (so as not to stick to the table and rolling pin) in a rectangle about 18x25 cm in size, 3-4 mm thick.
Remove the parchment. We form a sausage of white dough 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 cake. Then in the same way we wrap the second edge. We pinch the joint. And we roll the sausage back and forth on the table, so that the layers of dough pressed tightly against each other, and the biscuit did not further stratify.
Sprinkle paper with sugar and roll the sausage back and forth. Tightly wrap in parchment and place in the refrigerator for 1 hour.
After this time, turn on the oven to warm up to 170 ° C. Cover the baking sheet with a sheet of parchment paper. Prepare two saucers: with cloves and chocolate for decoration.
After delivering the blank, we cut the sausage into round pieces 1 cm thick.
Each circle slightly pressed with your fingers at the top and bottom. We insert along the carnation: below - with a bud outside, and from above - outside with a tail.
Insert chocolate “seeds” into the dough.
We spread the cookies on a baking sheet, leaving 3-4 cm between them: in the process of baking the “apples” grow up.
Bake at medium level oven at 170 ° C for 25-30 minutes. Do not overdo the cookies: when drying, the shortbread dough becomes hard. Therefore, be careful: the dough should remain light, except for a little bit of gold. Gently, in order not to burn yourself, try to press the dough with your finger: if it is already dry, there are no dents left, but at the same time it is still slightly soft, then it's time to get it. You can check with a skewer, the criteria are the same: the dough inside is dry, but not hard, but a little soft. When cooling down, the cookies will harden - consider this when baking.
In order not to break the hotter sand dough, let the cookies along with the parchment gently slide off the pan on the table. Let cool on a flat surface.
We spread the shortbread cookies “Green apples” on the saucers and invite homemade ones - to be surprised and to try!
