Recipe: Rooster Melt-in-Mouth German cookies

2017 is the year of the Rooster for the Chinese. It is not uncommon to see many cute little Rooster-themed items and food flooding the social media. haha. Of course, I wanted to make some myself too! I saw a recipe shared by my friend on Facebook and decided to give it a try. Sadly, it failed on my first try.

Then, I remember making the Sheep cookies two years back and decided to compare both recipes. To my surprise, both of the recipes using almost same proportion/ingredients. This got me thinking about why do the new recipe fail. I found out that I am not the only one after I reading some comments from others who also tried the recipes.

Not very pretty but hope its cute enough. =)

I began to look at the steps and noticed one very different step. On the other recipe, it suggested in adding more potato starch/flour if the dough is too sticky. Yet, my previous Sheep recipe stated that we need to chill the dough for 15mins after mixing. I decided to follow my previous recipe and it works, again! So, I decided to post and share this recipe for like-minded fellow home-bakers. I managed to make 46 little roosters from the recipe.

Hope you enjoy as much as I do. I will be tweaking the recipe again to add flavours and a different design. So, don't wait. Time to bake!

Hereby, I wish you a great year ahead!

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Rooster Melt-in-Mouth German cookies

Prep time: 20 mins
Cook time: 15 mins (per tray)


Ingredients

• 125g butter, soften (room temperature)
• 40g icing sugar, sifted
• 125g potato starch, sifted
• 80g plain flour, sifted

For decorations

• Large Heart-shape candies (for crown)
• Black Sesame (for eyes)
• Almond silver/slices (beak)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 170°C (degree Celsius), grease and flour baking pan if you are not using a non-stick pan.
2. Beat butter and icing sugar till fluffy and lighter in colour.
3. Sift in potato starch and plain flour, mix to form a soft dough. 
4. Cling wrap the dough and chill for at least 15 minutes.
5. Make small balls as the body of the rooster. Place the Heart shape candy on the top of the ball as the crown, then add the almond silver/heart as the beak. 
6. Bake in oven for 10-15 mins.
7. Leave the cookies to cool before removing them from the tray.

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Note:

1. Step 4 is very important. I have tried some recipe without this step and the dough is very difficult to work with.
2. Cling-wrap is important. If the dough is left to chill in fridge without the wrap, the dough will get very hard and tough. 
3. Replace almond silvers with heart candies for the beak to create an 'mouth-open' rooster.
4. The cookies are firm on the outside but very fragile, so handle with care.
5. Lightly hit the tray against the table before removing the cookies may be a good idea for most.