Mushroom Cookies (Mantar Kurabiye)



























This is a long lost recipe for me. Although I used to love these mushroom cookies, I completely forgot about them until the other day when I was thinking about what to make for my friends who'd come over for tea. Now, having a tea party is a very important social activity. You have to serve something with Turkish tea. It might be a cake, some sort of phyllo dough pastry (puff pastry or phyllo dough), cookies, potato salad, some kind of poğaça, or tabbouleh depending on the season and what you have in the pantry. Even if your guest is an unexpected one that catches you totally unprepared, there are vital things one can do: send the youngest kid in the household (if there's none in your house, find one from the neighborhood) to the bakery to fetch simit (sesame seed fastfood bread) or to the closest patisserie for goodies. But if it's a scheduled tea party, then you have all the time to contemplate on what to do. The social etiquette is to serve two different kinds: sweet and savory. I found the recipe at www.kekevi.com

Mushroom cookie, which, bytheway, has nothing to do with fungus other than its shape, is a perfect tea-time cookie.

2 eggs
2 sticks butter
1 cup powder sugar
1 cup corn starch
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp baking powder
2 1/2 cup flour

coco or nuts

-Mix well butter and sugar.
-Add eggs and beat well.
-Add in the rest of the ingredients except for coco. Mix well with a wooden spoon.
-Roll a piece of dough into a size of a golf ball (almost).
-Put 1-2 tsp coco on a flat plate. Find a small cap; I used the cap of carton orange juice container. Beer cap would work, too. Wet it a little. Press it first on coco and then on the ball-shape cookie dough. You may need to repeat this with every cookie.
-If you're feeling lazy or you don't want a mushroom-shape cookie, just put a hazelnut, almond, or pistachio on your cookies.
-Bake at preheated 370F for 10-12 minutes or until they have tiny cracks on them. Do not bake them until they turn yellow or brown! Or you'll lose that melt-in-the-mouth texture.

This is the best cookie ever!