Tropicana Lace Cookies

Posted by - www.LinsFood.com

Intricate!

This is my first month with this wonderful group and am looking forward to more, more, more! This month, we had a choice of 3 wonderful cookies: Black and White, Linzer and Lace Cookies. I opted for lace cookies as I am a huge fan of them and have been making Brandy snaps for as long as I can remember. I love developing and creating new recipes and was really looking forward to what I could produce with this. Ok, I thought I had a month but the extra day not withstanding, I was running out of time! So, I had to get going!

I had some friends over last weekend and took that opportunity to bake this challenge. I tweaked my old recipe here and there, added some condensed milk and desiccated coconut and voila - I present TROPICANA LACE COOKIES!

As a little kid, I used to make coconut fudge with my older siblings, my earliest memory of this is when I was 6, which means my sister was 9 and my brother was 8, with no parental supervision.  The ingredients were essentially freshly grated coconut and condensed milk. To this day, I fall to pieces at the merest hint of this combination! That's the memory I went for in creating Tropicana Lace.

Dry roasted coconut

Ingredients (makes about a dozen)

4 tbsp freshly grated coconut or desiccated coconut

1 tbsp golden syrup

20 g butter

1 tbsp condensed milk

2 tbsp caster sugar

3 tbsp flour

1 tsp rose essence

Spaced out blobs!

 

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180C/160 Fan. Line a baking sheet with baking paper if you have to.

2. Heat a small frying pan on low heat and dry roast the coconut until golden brown and the aroma hits you. Set aside.

3. Add the syrup, butter, milk and sugar in a small saucepan and heat, stirring to mix.

4. At the first sign of bubbles, add the flour, mix and take off the heat.

5. Add the coconut and rose essence and mix well.

6. Drop half a dozen spoonfuls of the mixture on the baking sheet, spacing them well apart as they will spread A LOT. If the mixture thickens, just heat it up again gently for the next round.

7. Bake for 6-8 minutes until completely flat and a uniform dark brown in colour.

8. Leave to cool completely, they will harden as they cool.

9. You can shape these cookies if you fancy, wrap them around a rolling pin about 30 seconds after they come out of the oven, before they get a chance to harden.

These are perfect as they are or served with ice cream. Even great crumbled over cakes and sundaes.

Pretty as a picture