Gold Dust Cookies

I know I know…you must be thinking where the hell is the gold dust on these cookies?

Well, the story goes like this…When my daughters were leafing through Nigella’s Christmas cook book (yes, even my kids love baking!), these Gold Dust Cookies caught their fancy. And you know how it is with kids, if they like something, they need it then and there. And I got an express request to bake them immediately, even though I had already baked them a bunch of their favorite Chocolate Crinkles. So I ended up halving the below recipe (keeping in mind my ever expanding waistline!). By the time these were ready, the kids couldn’t keep their hands off them.

The ones in the snap were the only ones left for me to taste within 10 minutes and I quickly took a snap before these also vanished…and in the mayhem, I forgot to dust the cookies with edible gold dust!
 
Ingredients
6 tablespoon soft butter
1/2 cup superfine sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
Edible gold dust cluster/glitter flakes
 
How To
Preheat the oven to 180 degree Celsius and line a baking sheet with baking parchment. Keep aside.
 
Cream the butter and sugar until soft. Beat in the egg. Add vanilla, flour, baking powder and salt and mix until you get a soft dough. Divide this dough into 2 equal parts and wrap each one in clingfilm and keep in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
 
Sprinkle your work surface with flour. Place one half of the dough on it and sprinkle some more flour on top. Roll this dough out to a thickness of about 5mm. Cut into shapes after dipping the cutter in some flour. Place these shapes a little apart on the lined baking sheet. Repeat this process until all the dough has been used up.
 
Bake in the oven for 8-12 minutes until the cookies turn pale gold around the edges. Though these cookies will be soft in the middle when you take them out of the oven, they will harden once cooled. Move the cookies from the sheet to a wire rack using a spatula and allow to cool.
 
Lastly, take a small paintbrush, dip in the edible gold dust or glitter flakes and give each cookies its gilded coating.
 
Source: Nigella Christmas cook book
 
Notes: I halved the recipe and got just about 15 cookies.