Sweet New Year's Gift Recipes

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Self-prepared sweets are perfect for a New Year's gift to relatives, friends and just people who are cute to you. The life hacker chose three delicious options: berry marshmallow, chocolate gingerbread cookie and Chinese fortune cookie, which, by the way, you can come up with yourself.;)

Chocolate gingerbread cookie

Ingredients:

• 3⅓ cups flour
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa
• ¾ cups of brown sugar;
• ¾ teaspoon baking powder;
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon ground ginger
• ¾ teaspoon of ground cloves;
• ½ teaspoon salt;
• 1 teaspoon orange peel
• 12 tablespoons of butter;
• 1 egg at room temperature;
• ¾ cups of molasses or buckwheat honey;
• 50 g of dark chocolate;
• ¾ cups of dried cranberries (optional).

Preparation

Preheat oven to 175 degrees and prepare a baking sheet.

Place all dry ingredients except chocolate and cranberries in a large bowl and stir well. Then add butter there and using your hands or a mixer, bring the dough to a sandy state: so that the butter mixes with the flour and can be squeezed between your fingers into a pancake. Then add the chocolate and stir again.

In a separate bowl, beat eggs and molasses or honey, add to the rest of the ingredients and knead until smooth. Divide the dough in two and roll them into layers approximately 6 mm thick. Wrap with cling film and refrigerate for at least 15 minutes, or better for a couple of hours.

Then take out one piece of dough, roll over it again with a rolling pin to smooth out any irregularities, and use the cookie cutters. Place the cookies on a baking sheet and place in the oven for 8-10 minutes. Readiness can be checked with a match or a wooden toothpick - it should come out of the cookie dry.

Even if it seems to you that the cookies are too soft, get it out anyway, especially if you are using honey instead of molasses. This will give you a really soft and delicious gingerbread cookie!

You can change the composition of the spices at your discretion, add dried fruits or nuts. The only thing that should be untouchable is ginger. For example, I didn't have ground cloves, so I used ground cardamom and added some nutmeg.

Berry marshmallow

Ingredients:

• 2 large apples;
• 80 g of cranberries or any other berries (can be frozen);
• 420 g sugar;
• 1 egg white;
• 80 ml of water;
• 10 g agar agar;
• icing sugar for decoration.

Preparation

Divide each apple into 4 pieces, core and bake at 160 degrees for about an hour. This is done so that the excess liquid evaporates and the applesauce turns out to be thick, otherwise the marshmallow will freeze for a long time. Defrost the berries and drain off excess water.

Pour the agar-agar into 80 ml of water. Chop the finished apples and berries in mashed potatoes and pass them through a sieve. For marshmallows, you need 150 g of applesauce and 50 g of berry puree.

During cooking, the apple and berry mass will almost double, so I recommend choosing roomy dishes. Put mashed potatoes, 200 g of sugar, half of the protein in a bowl and beat until smooth.

Transfer the swollen agar-agar to a saucepan and put on a low heat. As soon as it turns into jelly, add sugar there. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook for about 5 minutes. Remove from heat when a thread begins to reach behind a spoon.

In mashed potatoes with sugar, add the remaining protein and beat again until it begins to increase in volume and lighten. After that, continuing to work with a mixer, pour the agar-agar syrup in a thin stream and continue beating for another 5-7 minutes or until steep protein peaks are obtained (as for meringues).

Put the marshmallow mass in a pastry bag and squeeze out in small portions onto the prepared surface (I had a baking sheet with baking paper). Leave to dry for a day. Sprinkle the finished marshmallow with powdered sugar. Your gift is ready!

I decided to use blueberries instead of cranberries, but I was in a hurry - I didn't defrost the berries to the end. As a result, the marshmallow turned out to be more moist inside than it should be. It was inconvenient to take with your hands, but still delicious! On the second try, I took into account all the nuances and got a real homemade marshmallow.

And the last thing: it is advisable not to replace the agar-agar with gelatin - it will harden much worse.

Chinese fortune cookies

Ingredients:

• 1 cup wheat flour
• ¼ cups of rice flour;
• 2 teaspoons of starch;
• ½ teaspoon salt;
• 1 cup sugar
• 4 egg whites;
• ¼ cups plus 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil;
• 3 tablespoons of water;
• 1 tablespoon vanilla or almond extract, or a pinch of vanillin.

Preparation

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees and cover the baking sheet with baking paper.

In a large bowl, combine all dry ingredients. Whisk the whites lightly in a separate bowl. Make a hole in the flour mixture and pour the vegetable oil, water and vanilla extract into it. Mix everything well with a rubber spatula and add half of the protein. Mix thoroughly again so that there are no lumps. The mixture should be firm and smooth.

Pour the remaining protein into a bowl and beat the dough until smooth. It should look like a thick biscuit dough. If, for some reason, the dough is too thick (depending on the flour and the size of the eggs), add a little more water or egg white.

Put the finished mass on a baking sheet in about ½ tablespoon at rather large intervals (about 7 cm), since you will need to make pancakes from these small drops. Use a spoon, rubber spatula, or kitchen spatula to flatten the biscuits and round them. You can choose the diameter yourself. During the experiments, I stopped at 8 centimeters.

Place in the oven for 8-10 minutes or until tender. Make sure that the edges are not too dry, otherwise the biscuits will break when folding. Take it out of the oven, turn it over quickly, insert the fortune note, fold it in half, shape it and fold it into cupcake tins or something similar to secure it.

Do not put a lot of cookies on a baking sheet at once, even if they fit there, as you simply will not have time to roll them before they cool down and lose their elasticity. I was able to do no more than four at a time. Also, do not beat the whites too much, as the dough will begin to rise, and you need flat pancakes. So try to make sure that they go into the oven with a thickness of no more than 2 mm.

You can divide the dough into several parts and add food coloring to each for a multi-colored fortune cookie.

Store in a bag if you want it crispy.