chocolate rose cookies.

If you've absolutely nothing to do (like I was) and have reached your limit of scrolling through random webpages (like I had) and have refreshed your Instagram feed for the third time that minute (like I did), then you might wanna try making these cookies because not only are they fun - albeit slightly challenging at first - they take up around 2 hours of your time and leave you so strangely exhausted after you're done that you would feel like taking a 2 hour nap. So that's 4 hours spent productively. Yay.

The recipe is from a popular Japanese baking and cooking site called cookpad. There were directions on how to form the roses in the recipe which I tried to follow but my roses didn't turn out as well as I liked. I didn't know how much dough I should portion out for each petal, how big I should roll them out to and where to position them. Predictably, the first rose was horribly stumpy. I was getting the hang of it towards the end though so I decided to try again using a YouTube video as a reference and I think they turned out slightly better. Still, I shouldn't have tried to get ahead of myself and alter the recipe for the second batch - I swapped the sugar and cocoa powder for an instant coffee mix which made the dough a lot stickier than it was supposed to be, resulting in the need for a lot of extra flour. I got the consistency right in the end but I definitely overworked the dough. Not good. Oh I also traded the milk chocolate for white but I don't think this switch impacted the consistency of the dough significantly.

A tip for those who are interested in trying this idea out: the dough doesn't contain any butter or oil so it dries out considerably fast when exposed to air. Since a full quantity can comfortably make at least 6 large roses which will take you some time to finish, you should cover the dough with a piece of slightly damp cloth in order to prevent the dough from drying out. By doing so you can avoid unsightly cracks in the roses. Not sure what I mean? Refer to all pictures in this post.

These cookies are meant to be more of a visual treat than ones that are pleasing to the palate if you know what I mean. They don't taste bad; they're perfectly edible. If you ignore the fact that they're a little tough - an inevitable outcome of treating cookie dough like play-dough - they're pretty decent chocolate cookies.

All in all, I'm pretty pleased with my first ever attempt at making roses! Or at least I am with the second batch, although I think the dark chocolate roses looked better than the coffee ones before baking because of the color (see my Instagram). I bet that if I were to use fondant they would turn out horribly though. But I'll leave the impeccable crafting to the pros. For now. I think.

Chocolate Rose Cookies
makes 6 to 8 largish ones
original recipe here

70g milk chocolate
30g sugar
1 egg
120g flour
10g cocoa powder

optional: 20g skim milk powder, to bring out a shine in the cookies (didn't use because didn't have any)

Melt the chocolate. Stir in the sugar, egg, flour, cocoa powder and milk powder if using, in this order. Let the dough rest for 5 to 10 minutes.

Follow the directions in this YouTube link. For your reference, I used 2 grams of dough for each petal for the first three (the innermost ones) and 4 grams of dough for the rest.

Bake cookies at 170C for 15 to 20 minutes depending on their size.