This must be the easiest cookie recipe ever. I wanted to bake a large number of cookies to give as “Thank You†gifts to all guests that attended Ishaan’s birthday. Initial plan was to make Nankatayis – I actually stole this idea from my friend Deepa who did this for her son’s birthday. But making nankatayi in such a big batch would take a long time and lot of effort, as it is I was finding it hard to spend so much time in kitchen with a 12 month old baby. So I made up this recipe. I baked atleast 4 different batches of coconut cookies, every time changing something to finally arrive at the easiest recipe. I even gave it to my friends at work to get their feedback.
The dough here is very simple to make. Because of the consistency of the dough, it is very easy to shape them into cookies. Few days before the party, I bought some paper take out boxes, some thank you hanging things, some stickers. I baked some cookies on the previous day. Because of my miscalculations, I found that I did not have enough cookies to fill up all boxes. So on the big day, I woke up at 4AM and made remaining cookies. I was really satisfied with the way they turned out.
Ingredients: 4 cups all purpose flour (I used unbleached all purpose flour) 1 and 1/2 cups desiccated coconut 2 cups sugar 1 tea spn baking soda 2 cups butter 1 tea spn cardamom powder Few raisins
Method: Preheat the oven at 275F for 10mins. Melt the butter. Add it to all other ingredients(except raisins) and mix. Line the cookie sheet with silver foil (for easy clean up). Make small balls of the dough and keep it on the sheet. Leave around 2 inches space between two cookies. Keep a raisin on top of each ball and slightly push it in the dough. Bake for about 20mins or till done.
Makes about 80 cookies
Pictorial:
Few months ago, our friends Kalpana and her husband had invited us to their home for dinner. Kalpana is a great artist. She had such beautiful paintings all over her home. We were in awe looking at her master pieces. She is also a very good cook. We both started talking about food and she told me that she makes tofu chapatis. She mentioned, this adds protien to the chapatis and also makes them soft.
I usually don’t buy tofu. But I want to make it a point to use it more in my cooking because of its high protein content. This time I bought firm tofu. I crumbled half of it and made these chapatis. They came out really good.
Ingredients: 1 cup crumbled firm tofu 2 cups wheat flour Salt
Method: Crumble tofu. Add wheat flour, salt and enough water to it and make dough. Take small balls from the dough and make chapatis.
Pictorial:
