Pistachio & Ruby Chocolate Cookies
Crunchy, nutty, salty & sweet!
Ingredients:
140g pistachios, roasted & salted (split to 85g & 55g)
3 tsp coconut oil (or a nut oil of your preference)
90g unsalted butter, room temperature
80g brown sugar
72g caster sugar
½ tsp (2g) bicarbonate of soda
1 tbsp vanilla
1/4tsp Almond essence
1 egg
125g plain flour
Ruby choc pearls 100g
Garnish
Ruby choc buttons 150g
1 tsp salt flakes
Method:
Preheat oven at 200 c fan forced, and grease and line two large oven trays with baking paper.
Place 85g of the pistachios and oil (of your choice) in the small processor attachment of the stick blender. Process until smooth, then transfer to the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Finely chop the remaining pistachios and set aside.
Add butter, brown sugar, caster sugar, bicarbonate soda and vanilla to the peanut butter. Beat for about 3 to 4 minutes or until light and fluffy. Add egg and beat until combined. Fold in flour, the ruby choc pearls and reserved chopped pistachios.
Roll 24 x 20g of dough into balls and arrange on prepared trays, about 4cm apart. Gently press down onto each ball to flatten slightly, then shape edges to ensure they are evenly round.
Bake Biscuits in the oven for 8 minutes or until evenly cooked, golden brown and firm to touch.
Remove from the oven ,stand 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool.
Once the cookies have cooled, melt the ruby chocolate and using a fork drizzle them on the top. Quickly while the chocolate is still soft sprinkle the salt flakes over. Let the chocolate harden and enjoy!
Tips
If you don’t have a food processor like I don’t, you can alternatively use a stick blender to make the nut butter. Just roughly chop the nuts before you add them to blending container.
You can let the batter sit in the fridge for about 15 minutes if it’s too sticky to roll the balls.
Loosely place a foil over the cookies about 5 minutes into the bake to ensure your beautiful green bikkies don’t brown.
Melting the ruby chocolate buttons maybe a bit tricky at times. It may tend to lose its colour of burn very easily. Do it in 30 second bursts and if the buttons are all melted do not over do it.
Finally the Darren’s base recipe it calls for salt in the nut butter and the batter. I’ve skipped through both of these as I picked salt3d pistachios. If you use unsalted nuts for this recipe, you may need to add 1/4 tsp of flakes to the nut butter and 1 tsp flakes into the cookie batter.