Sweet Punch: Anjum Anand’s Easy Lime Cookies

Sweet Punch for the the month of May is ‘your choice’. Every month the organizers of the punch pick a bake and the members bake it. But this month, we were to pick our own bake and I chose to bake Lime Cookies from Anjum Anand’s New Indian. Before narrowing down on the this bake, I went through all the bookmarked recipes and I wanted to bake all of them! I could not make up my mind on my choice of bake. Three weeks ago, I was in Bay Area and we went to Sino for lunch. I was told that the molten lava cake at that restaurant is to die for! Unfortunately, little did we know that their pastry chef comes only after 4pm and that cake was not on the lunch menu 🙁 . That’s when I decided that I would bake molten lava cake for this month’s punch, as soon as I got back home. When I told U about the bake, he wasn’t very interested. I have a sweet tooth and he doesn’t.  So, I decided to put that bake on hold for few more days, until I have company to share the cake with. Then I remembered these lime cookies I was meaning to bake for a long time, ever since Iwon the cookbook back in December! The recipe yields only 8 cookies and that was exactly what I wanted, not too many to make me sugar high. So, it is lime cookies for the sweet punch!

Before getting to the recipe, let me say a few words about the cook book. I haven’t shared any recipes I have made from the cook book. I only tried 4 recipes so far and liked 3 of those a lot.  Those recipes are Raj’s cutlet, lime cookies and most liked of all the recipes I tried so far from this book is the Grilled Stuffed Mackerel. I grilled this fish at least 3 times so far and each time I made it, we licked out plates clean! The book has beautiful pictures tempting me to try out all the recipes and the recipes are well written too. I did tweak the recipes a little bit to suite my palate and they turned out good. Baked Chutney Stuffed Fish and Lightly Spiced Cucumber Peas & Mint are on my to try list. I saw someone posting a Goan Chicken Curry recently and since then, I am tempted to try that as well. Will share the Grilled Stuffed Mackerel recipe the next time I grill it.

Coming to the Easy Lime Cookies, I followed the recipe exactly as given, except for the addition of 1 tbsp. of milk to make the dough. I started of sticking to the recipe but I could not make the dough with the listed 2 tbsp. of butter. I remembered Soma baked these cookies and checked her blog.  She added some milk.  I went ahead and added some milk to bind the dry ingredients together, to make the dough. The cookies were not very sweet and perfect snack for tea time and can be prepared in matter of minutes. The author also gave instructions for pan frying the cookies but I opted to bake them instead.

Total Time: 18 – 25 minutes
Preparation: 10 – 15 minutes
Bake Time: 8-10
Yields: 8

Ingredients:

• ½ cup All Purpose Flour
• ¼ cup Confectioners’ Sugar
• 2 tbsp. melted Unsalted Butter or Ghee (I used melted butter)
• 1 tbsp. Milk (if required)
• 1 ½ tsp. Lime Zest
• 1 tsp. Superfine Sugar
• 8 Pistachios sliced and broken into small pieces

Preparation:

• Mix together all-purpose flour, confectioners’ sugar, butter/ghee, milk and half the lime zest to make the dough.
• Lightly pound together superfine sugar and remaining lime zest to make a lime coated sugar.
• Pre-heat the oven to 350F.
• Make 8-10 balls from the dough. I made 8 balls. Make round flat discs from each ball, pressing them in your palm. Press them with your fingers to flatten it as much as you can. Then place them a lined baking sheet and press them again to flatten them more. Thinner the cookie you make, crispier the cookies.
• Sprinkle lime coated sugar on the top of each cookie, followed by pistachios.
• Bake them for 8-10 minutes in the pre heated oven until the edges turn light brown. I baked them for 10 minutes. Remove them immediately from the baking sheet and let them cool completely on a cooling rack. I forgot to remove mine right away and some of my cookies continued to bake and were a little burnt. They were still edible and I finished all the cookies even before U got home from work!
• Once the cookies are cooled,  store them in an air tight container.

Note:

• Oven temperatures vary from oven to oven. Check the cookies 6-7 minutes into baking.
• Cookies will continue to bake even after removing from the oven.
• Cookies might be soft when you remove the cookies from the oven, they might be soft but as they cool, they will get crispy.

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