Saturday, January 22, 2011

Week 7: Chocolate Orange Cookies

My good friend SP requested my baking skills last week as she was planning to make a 'cupcake castle' for a friend's 21st birthday. Though I had no idea what exactly a 'cupcake castle' was, I was glad to help. This was under the assumption that she wanted help with the cupcake part, and not so much the castle part as I'm quite sure castles aren't exactly my area of expertise.  Since I was going over to bake anyways, I thought that we may as well make it bakefest and baked up something too.

The copious amounts of oranges I've been consuming in the form of smoothies recently was the inspiration for these cookies. And since chocolate is good in almost anything. . . Chocolate orange cookies were an obvious choice.

This recipe is loosely based on another chocolate cookie I made during our December exam period. I also made them as freeze-and-bake style cookies as I realised that this was much faster than to scoop out individual portions of dough. Besides, this makes for very aesthetically pleasing perfectly circular cookies. This recipe makes for many many cookies (I ended up with 114) but the dough can be kept frozen until your next craving, which is another great thing about freeze-and-bake cookies.

This one is definitely going in the 'favourites' pile. They are thin and crispy and taste just like those chocolate oranges that you smash before eating. Except better.


Chocolate Orange Cookies
Yield: 9.5 dozen or 114 in case you're not a math major

  • 1 butter, softened
  • 1.5 cups white sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 tbsp orange zest (2 large oranges' worth)
  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt

  1. Preheat oven to 350F
  2. Cream together, butter, sugar.  Add vanilla, eggs, and zest. Mix in remaining ingredients. Blend well.
  3. Roll dough into cylinders ~1.5" in diameter and freeze (you'll end up with 5-6 cylinders of dough)
  4. Slice into 1/5" slices and bake for 7.5 minutes (if the dough's too hard, a few minutes at room temperature is more than enough to soften them up)

Per cookie:
20 calories | 2.6g sugar | 0.2g fat

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