Hi! I'm Nicole Ferrigno. I'm here today with Lizzy Evelyn. We are with Paisley Fig pastry. Today, we're showing you how to make holiday cookies.
Next, we're going to show you how to finish our Chocolate Peppermint Sandwich cookies. We have the dough that has been chilling in the fridge for about an hour, just to firm up and we have made our peppermint filling. So, at this point, what we're doing is rolling the dough out, we're going to stamp out shapes and then bake.
Now, Lizzie is rolling to about a quarter inch and we will show what that looks like when she gets it to that point, but if you think of them as wafer cookies, so they should be fairly thin cookies and they're going to bake crisp. So, you want to roll them out fairly thin and if you roll from the center outward like Lizzie is doing, you will really get the best, most even and consistent dough.
This is a beautiful dough, very easy to roll, very pliable, doesn't crack a whole lot and you also don't need a whole lot of flour. Lizzie dusted the table with a little bit of flour, just so that the dough didn't stick to the counter top, but the nice thing about this dough is it's not terribly sticky.
We're going to go ahead and press shapes out of the dough now. I have a fluted round cutter. You really could do any shape. A plain round cutter would work fine. The fluted edge adds a nice touch, a little detail and Lizzie is dipping the cutter in flour, in between each cut and that just helps the dough not stick to the cutter. It will make the whole process a little easier.
A nice tool that I have at hand, just in case you needed, is a small offset spatula which is sometimes nice if you need it to sort of get under the dough, if the dough happens to be sticking at all to the counter top. She is just peeling away the dough and you are left with these beautiful fluted rounds.
What we're baking on today is something called a silpat which is a silicon baking sheet. These are really nice, very readily available in most kitchen supply stores. Certainly, if you don't have a silpat, you can go ahead and bake on a parchment paper which also makes baking easy, but the silpat is really nice and they are fairly affordable too.
So, we're getting the cookies loaded on to the baking sheet. I have the oven pre-heated right now, at about 350 and we're going to pop these in the oven for about 12 to 15 minutes until they are firm.
Now, the tricky part about this particular cookie is because of its dark color. Color will be not good indicator to you as to when the cookie is done. So, you really have to go in after about 12 to 15 minutes, feel the cookie, and make sure that it springs back from your touch that will be a better indicator as to whether it's done.
So, now our chocolate sandwich cookies have come out of the oven. They are cool and it's a great idea to put your cookies onto a cooling grid once they have come out of the oven, it will speed up the process, but these are nice and firm and cool. We have got our peppermint filling that we have made and you'll need two cookies, obviously, it's a sandwich cookie, you will need two cookies or two sides, I should say per cookie, a top and a bottom.
We're going to flip the cookies over, so that you're filling the inside of the cookie and Lizzie is going to demonstrate now, how to pipe and you're going to put enough filling into the center of one cookie so that when you sandwich it with the top cookie, the filling will ooze out towards the perimeter of the cookie and then you have got the finishing work to do.
What we have here in this container are a bag of crushed peppermint candies or candy cane whatever you can find in the store, something that has a little bit of festive color to it. So, there are star like mints that are green and red, those are nice. These are just candy canes. Go ahead and crush them up; they can be crushed in the food processor or just by hand. You can beat them with a rolling pin or hammer and then we're going to take the cookie that has been filled with the peppermint filling, roll the edges around in the crushed peppermint candy and you have just a really, really pretty finished effect that looks festive and Christmassy. You will just keep going here until you have you filled all of your cookies, filled and then coat the outsides with the crushed candy.
The other thing that's nice about that crushed candy is it gives it a nice crunch too. So, you have a lot of good texture with this cookie. So, we hope you have enjoyed watching some of the holiday baking that we have done today and we certainly hope that you will do some of it at home and happy holidays to you.
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