Gung hey fat choi!
Welcoming in the Year of the Sheep with my family and I thought I would do something more interesting than the typical dinner spread we usually have.
Meep. Lunar New Year Sheep Cookies. So cute am I right?
I did a post last year on all the different foods we usually have at the table and you can see all the individual dishes for Lunar New Year here.
The Dinner Spread
So I was inspired by a community of bakers over in Asia who were baking a ton of snacks for the upcoming celebrations and I wanted to honour the tradition with a basic shortbread cookie recipe.
Actually the recipe in and of itself is rather basic and unoriginal but the design and presentation is what won me over. The cute and clean design for sheep cookies is completely fitting for the Lunar New Year celebrations. I myself was born in the year of the Sheep and I can’t be happier that I have a cute cookie representation of my astrological sign.
Up close and personal. This one has a beauty mark on its cheek. :3
As a stickler for details, you may want to shop around for the right kind of chocolate chip to make the horns. The key is that you’re looking for chocolate chips that have a nice tip at the end of it and small enough that it nicely lodges on the side of the ball of cookie dough. The ones I used were from Camino (back from the Vancouver trip I made earlier this year).
- 50g of room temperature unsalted butter
- 125g of all-purpose flour
- 1 room temperature egg, beaten
- 2 ½ tablespoons of sugar
- 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
- Beat the butter and sugar until fluffy
- Add the egg in three small portions, incorporating well after each addition
- Add in the vanilla extract and mix well
- Sift in the flour and fold with a spatula until the dough begins to come together
- To assemble the sheep, you’ll want to measure out pieces of dough in 7g portions and roll it in a ball
- Take two smaller pieces of dough and create the fluff balls on the sheep’s head
- Position the two chocolate chips on the side and make sure they are pressed in
- Preheat the oven to 340F.
- For the eyes, you can either take two black sesame seeds and lodge them in place, create holes and then draw them on with melted chocolate after baking, or what you see in these pictures is cocoa shortbread that have been placed for eyes.
- Set the sheep balls on a baking sheet (you might want to flatten the bottom a bit to prevent rolling) and bake for 15 minutes.
-The Piquey Eater