Amidst lavish dishes and elaborate desserts, the simple unadorned cookie also has a place of pride on the traditional Christmas table. To bring on the magical spirit of Christmas on my blog I started my Christmas baking a tad early with a batch of ‘mauritian’ cookies, our melt-in-the-mouth Biscuit Champagne.

These have got to be the easiest cookies one can possibly dream of making. Requiring only basic ingredients, you can whip up these buttery cookies in no time at all. As I do not own a cookie press [yet] I used my faithful plastic piping bag with a large star tip. Kindly ignore my pathetic piping of these swirls; I was too tired to bother getting them anywhere near perfect.

The dough for biscuit champagne is soft enough to be moulded into just about any shape. If you like in a tropical paradise like mine with a room temperature at 30 oC, do freeze your cookies for about 15 minutes before sending them to the oven. This will help the cookies to hold their shape better during baking.

The recipe below is from an old newspaper clipping but to this day I have found no explanation for the name of this particular cookie. My guess would be that it was originally served with a flute of sparkling champagne but that sounds way too far fetched, right?

BISCUIT CHAMPAGNE

  

Ingredients:

125 g salted butter

45 g icing sugar

135 g all purpose flour

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1/8 tsp almond extract

Method:

  • Cream butter until light and fluffy.
  • Add icing sugar and sifted flour and fold in.
  • Add vanilla and almond extracts and beat in.

 

  • Line a cookie sheet with baking paper.
  • Spoon batter into a piping bag fitted with a star tip.
  • Pipe into swirls or whatever shape you feel like.

 

  • Bake at 150°C for 12-15 minutes until lightly browned.
  • Leave to cool for 5 mins before you try to yank them off the cookie sheet. Store in an airtight jar. Makes 10-15 cookies.