Try this quick and easy recipe for making delicious Moroccan orange biscuits (cookies)
Biscuits (cookies) are a type of treat that is pleasant to enjoy at all hours of the day: they are good for breakfast or for a tea snack, but also as the crowning end of a meal or simply comfort food in the evening while watching a movie or reading a book. There are truly an infinite variety of biscuits available, but below we suggest a simple recipe to bake delicious, orange, sablé biscuits in the space of just an hour.
These are biscuits with a slightly "sandy" consistency, hence the name coined in France, but they are prepared according to a traditional Moroccan recipe and are generally filled with orange marmalade. However, they are also very good with other jams and maybe even flavored with some spices.
Ingredients needed for Moroccan orange cookies:
- 250 grams of 00 flour
- 225 grams of unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 1 large egg
- 100 grams of granulated sugar, or cane sugar (or even half and half)
- 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract (or a sachet of vanillia essence)
- 1 teaspoon (about 4 grams) of baking powder (if it's vanilla flavoured, you can exclude using vanilla extract)
- a pinch of salt
- orange jam / marmalade
How to prepare the cookies:
- Leave the butter out of the fridge long enough for it to reach a soft consistency (it must be at room temperature to be easily incorporated into the dough).
- Turn on the oven at 170 degrees C (340 degrees F).
- With an electric mixer (or by hand with a fork or a sturdy whisk) mix the butter with the sugar in a bowl. When it starts to get softer, finish working it with a spatula to get a cream
- In another bowl, whisk the egg together with the vanilla until you have a frothy mixture
- Incorporate the egg into the butter cream with the help of the spatula. Don't worry if you break apart the egg a bit in this step.
- Sift together the flour with the baking powder, then mix it with the other ingredients using the spatula.
- Knead the mixture until you get a smooth and non-sticky dough. Add flour as needed to make it less sticky.
- You can (but it is not strictly necessary) leave the dough in the refrigerator for half an hour
- Begin to shape the biscuits: they can have whatever shape you prefer, but remember that for each biscuit you need two layers of dough, the upper one with a hole in the center. Divide the dough in half and roll out both parts into sheets of 4 millimeters thick each. Having two sheets will help you make the two halves for each cookie, but if you're more comfortable working on just one, do so.
- Line a low cookie tray with parchment paper and fill it with the lower and upper layers of each cookie, far enough apart to allow for rising.
- Cook for about 10 minutes until golden, then remove from the oven and let them cool.
- Meanwhile, heat the orange jam in a saucepan over low heat, until it simmers
- Put a teaspoon of jam on each biscuit base and close it with the respective top (i.e. the one with the hole)
- If you want, you can sprinkle the cookies with icing sugar.
Your cookies are now ready. However, you could also customize them using a different jam, such as apricot jam.
If you use oranges and you like spicy flavors, you could add powdered cardamom or powdered cinnamon (a teaspoon) to the mixture instead of vanillin. Cinnamon also goes well with a pear jam, for example.
Nothing prevents you from adding chocolate chips to the dough, or stuffing with peach jam and adding a little chopped pistachio on top of the jam itself. In short, they are very simple cookies that lend themselves to a thousand combinations and experiments, try the ones that inspire you the most!
