Dia Cookies

An empirical recipe for delicious disaster

Ingredients:
180g butter
1 1/4 cups raw sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 egg
3 cups plain flour, sifted
1 1/2 teaspoons sodium bicarbonate, sifted
packet of hundreds & thousands
some milk

(Makes 60 small cookies or 30 cookies that are twice as big as the small ones)

• Beat butter and sugar in a bowl with a rotary beater until you wish you’d bought an electric mixer.
  
• Give up and proceed to the next step by adding the vanilla and egg. Mix well.
  
• Add the flour and the sodium bicarbonate.
  
• Divide the dough into three and roll each portion into a sausage shape about 3cm diameter. Wrap in cling wrap and refrigerate until firm (about 30 minutes).
  
• Come back about an hour later, having read the paper, and curse at the rock hard dough in the fridge. The rolls will have flattened at the bottom, giving it its natural ‘Dia’ shape.
  
• Preheat the oven to 180C.
  
• Unwrap the rock hard dough and cut it into 7mm slices. Arrange them neatly on a tray or trays (preferably non-stick) and allow for spreading.
  
• Pour a thin layer of milk into a jar lid. Use your finger to paint the milk onto the surface of the dough slices.
  
• Sprinkle the hundreds & thousands onto the dough slices and hope that they stick to the milk. Don’t bother chasing the ones that escape onto the tray. It isn’t worth it. Trust me.
  
• Place tray/s in oven. Bake for 10-15 mins. Remove before they get brown. Or even golden brown. Discover that they haven’t spread quite as far as you thought they would.
  
• Bemoan a lack of wire racks. Allow cookies to cool on the trays. Prise them off before the trays are cooled down and flash burn your fingertips. Eat some and get your flatmate to taste one. Take a photo of nicely arranged cookies. Transfer into an airtight container.

This Dia cookie recipe is a bastardisation of a basic Family Circle cookie dough recipe and a recipe for Hundred & Thousands biscuits that I found in an English textbook. Apparently you can keep the cookie dough in the fridge for up to a week or frozen for up to a month. Presumably you will need to let the frozen cookie dough defrost a little before you can safely cut it into slices.

They are called Dia cookies because the individual cookies resemble half moons*.
(* only people used to my warped sense of humour will understand this explanation).

P.S: Obviously I did not superglue my fingers together.