Sunday recipe: Confetti cookies

Bejewelled, pillow-soft vanilla-scented cookies are just what you need when you are craving beauty and deliciousness

SLOUGH, ENGLAND:

It is not often that flamboyantly colourful baked goods taste anything remotely like something you’d want to eat. Confetti cookies are the rare exception to the rule. Studded with jewel-like rainbow sprinkles on the outside, these pillow-soft melt-in-your-mouth confetti cookies envelop you in that special vanilla aroma normally only found in your favourite bakery.

Since I find hard labour utterly abhorrent, these cookies are super easy to clobber together. There is no creaming of butter and sugar, no fiddling with mixer settings, and no waiting for ingredients to warm up to room temperature. You literally dump everything into a food processor, switch it on, and hey presto, you have your dough ready a minute later. Shape the dough into balls, roll each ball in a bowl full of sprinkles, flatten with your hand, and bake.

The only unusual ingredients here are Philadelphia cream cheese, sprinkles, and almond essence – although in a pinch, you could leave out the almond essence if you wanted to. Philadelphia cream cheese, however, is non-negotiable. It gives these cookies the ultimate velvety texture on the inside. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to use those little cheese triangles you spread on toast in these cookies unless you want to enact revenge by feeding them to your arch-nemesis. Some of us have gone down this dark path before. We took the bullet so you don’t have to.

But back to confetti cookies. Turn on your oven to 180C/350F. Spread a baking sheet on two baking trays. In a food processor, throw in 8oz unsalted butter, 2oz Philadelphia cream cheese, ¾ cup sugar, 1 egg, 1tsp vanilla essence, ¼ tsp almond essence. Using a measuring cup, add 3 cups plain flour (levelled with a knife), along with 1tsp baking powder and ¼ tsp baking soda. Run the food processor until the ingredients come together. That’s it! That’s your dough!

Shape your dough into little balls so they are roughly the same size. An ice cream scoop will also suffice but will yield bigger (and thus fewer) cookies. The choice is yours.

In a bowl, take out 1 cup of sprinkles. Dunk each ball in sprinkles, flatten, and space widely apart on your prepared baking tray. These do spread as they bake, so leave enough room in between cookies. It’ll be a pain baking it all in shifts, but it will be worth it when you don’t have to break up what has essentially become one giant cookie.

Bake at 180C/350F for 9-10 minutes. Wait 10 minutes for your cookies to cool down and set. Transfer them to a plate so they can cool down further. Admire their prettiness. Perfect for dunking with a cup of coffee. Store in an airtight container.

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