Biscochitos
These homemade Biscochitos shouldn't simply be saved for special celebrations thanks to the ease that these crisp butter cookies come together. The lightly spiced cookies are simple to make so all home cooks can give them a go!
Servings 20 medium cookies
Calories 146kcal
Ingredients
Cookies
- 240 grams / 1 ½ cups plain flour sifted
- 3 grams / ¾ teaspoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoons anise seed or ground anise
- ½ teaspoon sea salt
- 156 grams / 5.5 ounces butter softened
- 60 grams / ⅓ cup superfine/caster sugar
- 35 grams / 1 small egg
- 14 grams / 1 tablespoon sweet white wine or any 1 of the following; brandy, rum, apple or pineapple juice
Coating
- 30 grams / 2 tablespoons superfine/caster sugar
- ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
Instructions
- Toss the flour, baking powder, ground anise and salt into a bowl and stir together. Set aside.
- Place the butter and sugar into a bowl and beat on medium speed until fluffy and light, approximately 8 minutes.
- Add the egg and wine or juice and whip until well combined.
- Toss in ⅓ of the flour mixture and beat on the lowest setting until no dry portions remain.
- Repeat in stages until the dough is formed, no dry portions remain on the sides of your bowl and it is a crumbly texture.
- Place the dough in the fridge to chill for at least 1 hour, but overnight also works well.
- Preheat the oven to 180C/350F and line baking sheets with parchment paper.
- In a separate bowl, stir the sugar and cinnamon coating together and set aside.
- Turn the dough onto a lightly floured surface and roll out to ⅓ inch thickness.
- Cut out circles, stars or diamonds (or all three) from the dough, handling as little as possible in the process.
- Place onto a lined baking tray with 1 inch between and bake until lightly golden brown at the edges, approximately 12 minutes.
- Allow to sit on the baking sheet for a couple of minutes before tossing in the sugar cinnamon coating.
- Transfer to a cooling rack to cool completely.
- Serve up with a cup of hot chocolate and dig in.
- Enjoy!
Video
Notes
- Butter: Unsalted butter is used for the cookie, but if all you have on hand is salted, that works as a fine substitute, just leave out any salt suggested in the recipe. Lard can also be used here as that is most often a more traditional ingredient than butter for these cookies. If using lard, the weight required for this recipe would be 112 grams/3.9 ounces.
- Brandy or wine: Traditional brandy is used in this biscochito recipe helping compliment the rich flavors in the anise dough. You could use a wine or even juice in equal measure here.
- Anise: Anise seed is traditionally used here and has a much subtler flavor when compared to star anise. If you cannot source anise seed, you can replace with ground star anise in these cookies, however, you’ll want to halve.?
- Ground cinnamon: The ground cinnamon in our sugar coating also gives our cookies their signature flavor.
- Cookie cutter: A round, half moon or star cookie cutter (or all three) makes these nice and traditional. The round cookie cutter used here was 6.5 centimeters or 2.6 inches.
Nutrition
Calories: 146kcal