Café of the East

I started to organize my recipe collections of biscuits/cookies recently in preparation for the coming Chinese New Year baking. Well, what can I say, after the success of the Mango Tarts for Christmas, I am now thinking of baking that again, but doing the traditional pineapple filling, plus some other biscuits like Kuih Bangkit (which I have never had success with which bugged me to no end, grrrrr……), Cashew Biscuits, Kuih Arab (aka Ghee Biscuits) etc. While pulling together some of these common CNY biscuit recipes, I came across about four recipes for this biscuit called Biskut Mama Carries which I have downloaded from the net previously. All of them were written in Malay. The name actually caught my attention in the first place, maybe that’s why I downloaded the recipes. In my imagination, it reminded me of those old fashioned, cosy type of comfort food where Mama-, Papa-, Granny-, etc are attached to the front of their brand names. So, I tried to search where the name came from, is it a brand name called Mama Carries, or is it the name of the person who first created the recipe, but I came up with nought!
I must admit I haven’t really paid much attention to the recipes before even though I had taken the trouble of downloading them, but as I browsed through one of the recipes which has a small picture attached with the recipe, I read through it carefully. Then I read the others and found that they were all very similar. The biscuit part is almost identical to the pastry that I had used for making the Mango Tarts. So I dropped what I was doing and sort of put those recipes together and came up with this version, hehehe……… I am really glad I made them because they came up a treat, and not too sweet. The biscuit is melt-in-the mouth, the icing is very crispy on the outside with a slightly chewy texture on the inside, hmmm, yummy! However the only problem, if I could call it a problem at all, was that the icing part lifted up from the biscuit after baking… Not sure what happened there, as the picture which caught my attention had the icing sitting prettily on top of the biscuit. Maybe it was due to my addition of extra icing sugar because I thought the icing was too thin for spreading consistency, and I added extra 10g of icing sugar to the recipe. Am also wondering whether the cornflour quantity was a bit too much… But that was just my pickiness, all in all still very delicious!
Lastly, as I have never actually seen or eaten this biscuit before, I’m not really sure whether it is only made in the shape of heart, or can be any other shapes, since the recipes I have all indicated heart-shaped. From the only picture of it, it looked very petite, probably can be popped into your mouth in one whole piece. As my smallest heart shaped cookie cutter is still quite big, I have to use that to make, which in comparison to the picture looks about twice its size, not petite at all, oh well!

Makes approx. 20 biscuits (or depending on size of cutter used).

[Ingredients]
Biscuit dough:
180g unsalted butter, softened
240g plain flour
30g vanilla custard powder
30g milk powder
pinch salt
60g icing sugar
1 egg yolk
Icing:
1 egg white
100g icing sugar
10g (1 tablespoon) cornflour
1/2 tablespoon (approx.) cocoa powder
http://cafeoftheeast.blogspot.com/
[Preparation]
1. Preheat oven to 180°C. Sift plain flour, custard powder, milk powder and salt. Cream softened butter with icing sugar until pale and creamy. Beat in egg yolk to combine. Fold in sifted flour mixture until you get a soft dough.
2. Roll out dough to about 1cm thickness and using a heart shaped cutter, cut out the dough. Space them out on a cookie tray.
3. Beat egg white with sugar until stiff peaks, fold in cornflour. Remove about 2 tablespoons of the meringue mixture and mix in cocoa powder to make a brown meringue. Spread white meringue onto each piece of the biscuit dough. With the brown meringue, use a toothpick or bamboo skewer to make some design on the white meringue.
4. Bake on middle shelf of the preheated oven for about 15 minutes, or until the biscuit is light golden brown in colour. Remove, cool then store in airtight tins.

[Note]
1. Please note this recipe uses 1 standard cup of 250ml, 1 tablespoon of 20ml and 1 teaspoon of 5ml.
2. The size of egg used is about 60g (includes shell) unless otherwise stated.