Butter cookies

It is saturday again! I have come to enjoy the precious 48 hours that we have each weekend.

I decided not to go to work today. I am in a baking mood!

Today, I took out a notebook of recipes that I recorded sometime between 1985 to 1988. As I flipped through the pages, a lot of memories came back to me. In particular, there is a recipe (Chewy Turtle Cake) that my cousin recorded years ago. She passed away suddenly a few years ago from lung cancer. I miss her a lot.

(p.s. I just happened to glance at a headline in the newspapers that Da is reading. It says "Lung Cancer vaccine on the way". Such a bitter feeling I have at this very moment.)

Anyway, I usually have a ready stock of plain flour, castor sugar, etc at home. Today, I decided to bake butter cookies. This recipe was given to me by my Chinese tuition teacher sometime in 1985. You can use margarine if you do not fancy the taste of butter. However, the use of butter makes the cookies very flavourful.

I have made the butter cookies many times in the past. When I just started work, as a trainee, I used to bake cookies and cakes and leave them in the office pantry for my colleagues to sample. Nowadays, I will leave the bottle / container on my secretary's table and leave it to her to distribute the cookies / cakes amongst her buddies. Who knows? Next week, we will be moving back to the building where our office used to be located. Perhaps containers of cookies / cakes may start appearing in the office pantry again?

Enough of nostalgia. For those of you out there who have tried the butter cookies and who are dying to have the recipe and for those of you who want to try out a new recipe, here goes... (note: the recipe below is not the exact recipe that my tuition teacher gave me. I have modified it over the years):-

Ingredients

350g butter (softened)

350g castor sugar

1 tsp vanilla essence

dash of ground cinnamon

dash of ground almond

dash of ground peanuts

chopped peanuts / diced almonds

2 eggs

1 tsp baking powder

175g corn flour

525g plain flour

Method

1. Beat the butter, sugar, vanilla essence, ground cinnamon, ground almond, ground peanut and chopped peanuts / diced almonds and mix thoroughly.

2. Add the eggs 1 at a time, each time mixing well.

3. Sift the baking powder, corn flour and plain flour and stir into the mixture using a wooden spoon.

4. Roll out to desired size and cut using a cookie cutter.

5. Bake in an oven pre-heated to 190 degrees celsius for 20 minutes or until golden brown.