The combination of oat flakes, roasted almonds and sweet and sour cranberries with the delicate melting of white chocolate in this recipe is really ingenious. Oat and almonds are the stars of the recipe. They add flavor and texture. The oat flakes provide a nutty base, while the almonds add a fine, elegant note that tastes of fairgrounds and childhood.
The recipe comes from a book with numerous great cookie recipes, all of which are so exciting that we can only recommend this book to you: “Sweets” by Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh (no, we don’t get paid for advertising).
Interestingly, these cookies also gave us another idea: if you bake them in the form of oblong bars, they should also work perfectly as muesli bars, for example for a hike or a picnic! Since in this case there is a risk that the chocolate coating will melt, we would suggest incorporating the chocolate into the dough in small pieces or even leaving it out. We are looking forward to experiments and experiences.
First we preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius (without convection), then we roast almonds in it until they are golden brown and have the unmistakable smell of toasted almonds. This takes about 10 minutes. Be careful: in the end they burn very easily, so you should not take your eyes off the oven. We want roast aromas, but not coal. As soon as the almonds are out of the oven, we increase the temperature to 190 degrees.
When the almonds have cooled slightly, they are roughly chopped with a knife. Feel free to leave larger pieces, the crunch is really tasty.
Then we mix the almonds with oat flakes, flour and salt in a bowl.
For our cookies, we start with butter – should you prefer a vegan preparation, this and the type of chocolate are the only substitutions you will have to make. Soft butter is mixed with sugar to form a fluffy mass. You can use a blender or a food processor for this. A whisk will also work, but you should then work with very soft or liquid butter. Take your time when mixing; if the sugar and butter combine well, the cookies simply get better.
Next, we add our already mixed dry ingredients and make the dough. The rule here is: don’t mix for too long! The ingredients should only be just combined. At the end we also add cranberries.
We didn’t use grated orange peel because there were no good organic oranges in the house. If you want to perfume the dough a little, you can also use orange blossom water (about 1 tablespoon) from the Turkish supermarket or a tablespoon of Grand Marnier or Cointreau.
Now the cookies are formed. We roll out the dough on a lightly floured work surface into a sheet about half a centimetre thick. Of course, round cookie cutters work well. If you don’t have one, use a glass or a knife to cut diamonds or squares.
If there are any edges left when cutting out, simply roll out the remaining dough again until there is nothing left.
Place the cookies on a greased tray, baking paper or a baking mat.
Baking the cookies takes about 18 minutes. As soon as the cookies are light golden brown, we take them out of the oven and let them cool.
We use white chocolate for the glaze. To cover cakes or cookies, couverture is best. You have to know that – at least with dark chocolate – this is usually the higher quality compared to chocolate bars from the candy shelf – you wouldn’t have guessed, right? It contains much more cocoa butter (over 31%), which means it tastes better and is also much easier to process. You shouldn’t confuse couverture with icing containing cocoa, there is hardly any cocoa butter in it, but coconut fat and all sorts of other fats, so the chocolate bar from the sweets section would definitely be better.
The art lies in tempering the chocolate correctly so that it looks nice and shiny and is pleasantly crunchy when you eat it. Otherwise, the surface will become dull and gray and the chocolate will crumble rather than break. A complicated process, hard to explain. To put it simply: Chocolate consists of different fats that can arrange themselves in different ways when they harden again. Some arrangements are sturdier than others and make the chocolate shiny and crunchy.
Tempering means that the chocolate is first brought to temperature, not too hot (around 45 degrees Celsius), then cooled briefly below the melting point (around 27 degrees) and then slightly melted again (around 32 degrees).
This can only be achieved with a water bath.
Professionals do this by pouring the melted chocolate onto a cool surface and then letting it cool while stirring it again and again. It is then slightly warmed again to achieve the desired consistency. Of course, this is usually not possible in a household.
It takes a little practice to temper chocolate correctly, but with a little patience you can learn how to do it, even without a thermometer.
If you don’t have a special bowl, try placing one of your mixing bowls or a small pot with handles on another pot filled with a little water, making sure that the container with the chocolate does not touch the water – it will only be heated by the steam in the lower pot. Bring the water to a gentle boil and then turn the heat to medium. Melt the chocolate slowly in the container over the steam, then turn the cooker down to zero and stir with a wooden spoon until the chocolate cooles down. Now reheat until the mixture is just liquid again.
You can now use the back of a spoon to apply a white chocolate icing to the cookies. Cooling takes about 30 minutes. The result is a cookie with a brilliantly crunchy taste, crowned with a layer of melt-in-the-mouth white chocolate.
Enjoy.
And may the taste be with you.
Ingredients (about 30 pieces for round cookies with a diameter of 7 cm):
150 g whole almonds
150 g flour
75 g wholemeal flour
150 g oat flakes
1 pinch of salt
225 g soft butter (alternatively: vegan butter)
100 g sugar
125 g dried cranberries (soaked in a little orange juice or Grand Marnier)
200 g white chocolate for the glaze
optional: 1 tbsp grated zest from an organic orange
