CHOCOLATE CHIP & BUCKWHEAT COOKIES … Hot Cross Cookies for Easter!!

Back from a short holiday and back to the mundanities which include making breakfast! Why do vacations come to an end so quick? Egg time with the kids on an Easter break … Roald Dahl inspired hot house egg for junior, and French toast for the daughter. Bored out of my mind, I began to look for something more fulfilling to do. Eggs remind me of Easter and I decided to put the empty egg shells to good use.

I love doodling, so I emptied the eggs out carefully after making a tiny hole at one end. Also thought I would make some buckwheat chocolate chip cookies a little later in the day. That offered me the bonus of more egg shells, and importantly the added bonus of egg whites for macarons for MacTweets! Egg-citing times to kill boredom!

Egg shells rinsed well, bereft of all eggy smells, I piped some white acrylic paint designs on them and let them dry. I would have liked to do them with stickers like Bethany, but couldn’t find any small stickers, so paint seemed the next best option for unedible egg shells. I would have loved to make Kinder Surprise Eggs like Joy, but too late; I didn’t boil them nor did I remove the inner membrane with my pinky finger!! Wasn’t sure how acrylic paint would react to boiling, so all plans abandoned.  This time I’ve got to be happy with Easter eggs safe in their nest with colours I like. The daughter chose the blue one as her fave, the son liked them all!
To make Sunday more worthwhile I made chocolate chip buckwheat cookies, buckwheat being my recent obsession, and a surprisingly welcome addition to these cookies. It offers a nice bite to the texture of the cookie, making them crisp and delicious … healthy too. The deep colour of the cookie is due to this dark nutty milled seed flour, which darkens on contact with liquid. Not very pretty cookies to look at, but pretty delicious!!

Energizing and nutritious, buckwheat is available throughout the year and can be served as an alternative to rice or made into porridge. While many people think that buckwheat is a cereal grain, it is actually a fruit seed that is related to rhubarb and sorrel making it a suitable substitute for grains for people who are sensitive to wheat or other grains that contain protein glutens. Buckwheat flowers are very fragrant and are attractive to bees that use them to produce a special, strongly flavored, dark honey. 

I made these cookies a while ago for the first time. At that time, I had used a lower ratio of buckwheat to flour as in the recipe below. At that time the weather was cooler and so 3 egg yolks worked well. My experiment was inspired with my success using this alternate nut flour in this Double Chocolate Espresso Biscotti.  This morning, I made them with equal flour and buckwheat, 3 egg yolks,  and they were still delicious, though they spread a teeny bit. With summer firmly set in and temperatures touching 40C, I think 2 egg yolks should work better to arrest the slight spreading of the cookies.

I made them into hot cross cookies because I didn’t have the time or energy to make hot cross buns, though I would have liked to! A theme, a holiday, a festival, an event all inspire me to think and mak something relevant. I love the connect, and so lavished some ‘hot crosses‘ on the cookies using a mixture of powderd sugar and a little milk! Happy Easter Sunday!!