Passionfruit Gems

How do you spend your Sunday night's?  Personally, I like to try and escape the enveloping darkness of doom (i.e. returning to work!) by picking a book from the shelf and loosing myself in its pages for a few hours.  Not a 'novel' kind of a book either, not a page turner of a book with characters and storyline's, no siree, its always a recipe book!  Yes I am one of those people who has a pile of cookbooks beside my bed and I feel no shame in admitting that ;0)

So this recipe comes from one of my Sunday night musings, a book my Mum sent me for Christmas last year called quite simply 'Cookies'.  Its an Australian Women's Weekly publication and is stuffed full of amazing looking cookies.  It comes as no surprise that the ones to catch my eye use Passionfruit which has got to be one of my all time favourite flavours ever.

Passionfruit Gems
150g plain flour
75g SR flour
2 tbsp custard powder
110g icing sugar
90g cold butter, chopped
1 egg yolk
60ml passionfruit pulp (about 1 1/2 passionfruits)
Butter Icing
125g unsalted butter, softened
240g icing sugar
2 tbsp milk

Process the dry ingredients and butter together until crumbly; add egg yolk and passionfruit pulp, pulse until ingredients come together.

Loving that colour!

Knead dough on a floured surface until smooth.  Roll between sheets of baking paper until 5mm thick; refrigerate for 30 mins.

Preheat the oven to 180C/fan 160C.  Grease oven trays; line with baking paper (I hate greasing oven trays and as I had run out of baking paper I floured the tray's instead).

Using a 4cm round flower shaped cutter, cut rounds from dough.  Place about 3cm apart on oven trays.

Bake for about 10 mins.  Cool on wire racks.

Make the butter icing; beat the butter in a small bowl with an electric mixer until it is as white as possible.  Gradually beat in half the sifted icing sugar, milk, then the remaining icing sugar.  (I still had half a passionfruit left over so I added this to the icing and reduced the amount of milk accordingly).

Spoon the icing into a piping bag fitted with a small fluted tube.  Pipe stars onto cookies.

Makes 70
'Cookies' Australian Women's Weekly

These are yummy!  However, I have a few points to highlight.  I got far less than 70 cookies from the dough, which I am prepared to admit is probably down to me [ahem] firstly I need to readdress my idea of what 5mm looks like, secondly the smallest cutter I have is 48mm so my cookies were not only thicker but bigger too - I don't mind this though.  And then I discovered that along with running out of baking paper I also had an empty packet of piping bags sat in my draw, very helpful!  So I had to spoon the icing onto the cookies, they don;t look as pretty as they should but thankfully that doesn't affect the flavour at all ;0)