The mother of my maternal grandfather Aldo often made cookies and cakes for her numerous grandchildren. I have a photograph of her in which she looked very old, even though she must have been around sixty at the time.
Mom told me that she and her brothers loved these cookies very much out of a huge sense of transgression. In fact, her grandmother served them as a snack accompanied by an anisette liqueur in which they could soak them. The liquor was given to children! I can’t believe she asked them not to tell their parents.
Grandma Anna's cookies
- Preparation time: 60 minutes
- Ingredients to makes about 50 cookies
- Difficulty: Easy recipe
- Ingredients
- 2 cups (300 g) of all-purpose flour
- 2/3 cup (150 g) of sugar
- 1 egg
- 1/3 cup (80 ml) of milk
- 1/2 sachet of Baking powder
- Grated zest of ½ lemon
- 4 tablespoons (60 ml) of seed oil
- Brown sugar to taste
- Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350°F.
- In a bowl, mix the flour with the oil, the egg, the sugar, the lemon zest, and the baking powder. Add the slightly warm milk slowly until the dough becomes soft, but not sticky. Knead quickly and form a loaf. Leave it to rest, covered, for thirty minutes.
- Take pieces of dough and use your hands to form loaves of a couple of centimeters in diameter. Cut the loaves every 8 cm. The cookies should be similar in size to the fingers of an adult hand.
- Pass them in brown sugar.
- Arrange the biscuits on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper and bake them in the oven until golden brown.
Tips to ensure the success of the dish:
- Both the flour and the yeast must first be sieved.
- Add the milk slowly because each type of flour absorbs liquids in a different way. The dough must be soft, but not sticky.
- The biscuits should be placed spaced apart on the baking tray because they will expand during cooking.
- The short crust pastry should not darken too much, so it is better to check its cooking every now and then. My oven takes about twenty minutes.
Grandpa Pietro
