My Ebony & Ivory Biscuits

I had done these a while back but was so lazy to put up the recipe despite my empty promises that I would do so that week itself when I had posted it on my page. My sincere apologies to my readers especially to a specific lady friend SM who had enquired when I would do so? It had been at the back of my mind all along but somehow I had delayed.

When I had done this, it was with two beautiful intentions in my mind, the first being for a buddy's little son when he would pick his order from me and the second being for a young lady who had answered a quiz that I had put up...Scratch!Scratch! I don't even remember what I had asked....Oh Ok, it was something to do with what the filling was in the Monkey Bread that I had made :)

As I was meeting her for the first time as well, I thought I should bake her something from my kitchen as she has been a regular reader and always takes time out to appreciate and comment on mine as well as many others' posts or pictures. Now that I must admit is very rare to find these days! So this is to you my beautiful pilot friend Deep!

Without further ado, I would jump to the recipe :-

240 grams of flour/APF was sieved along with a tsp. of baking powder and 1/8 tsp. of salt and set aside. About 130 grams of butter was creamed along with 120 grams or slightly less than a cup of powdered sugar.

Once the mixture was creamed, the sieved flour along with half a tsp. of vanilla essence and three tbsp. of milk were added to the mixture and mixed gently to a stiff dough. The dough was then divided into two parts.

To one part three tbsp. of cocoa powder was added and that was thoroughly kneaded to blend in. Leave the other part plain. Thus you have before you two tones-Ebony and Ivory. They are now ready for you to play with like play dough just that this is edible!

To make the pinwheels as shown in the first two pics. Flatten out or thinly roll out individually both the dough the plain one and the chocolate one. Place the chocolate one on top of the plain one and roll the two tightly as you would do for a cinnamon roll, Swiss roll or any roll.

Place the rolled dual coloured roll into the fridge to cool and then slice them through and later bake them.

 If you want to do this mix and match version as shown in the other pics, take both the plain and chocolate dough separately and make bars out of them and cut them out into thick strips of cuboids and mix and match them as you would see in a checker board. Layer the cuboidal strips one on top of the other or by the side of an alternating colour, ensuring that no two similar colours are one on top of the other or beside each other.

Once it goes into the fridge to cool, the dough becomes easy to slice before baking. Cut them into a quarter inch thickness and place them on a well greased baking tray. It goes into a preheated oven at 180 degrees Celsius for about ten to fifteen minutes or as per your oven's specifications.

Enjoy them! I hope I was able to create some happiness with the friends I shared them with. I am so often reminded by the lovely song by Sir John McCartney and Stevie Wonder, Ebony and Ivory. Thus I baptised my biscuits like so.

 

Inspired from a few recipes on the net and a book by Nita Mehta.