Chinese Almond Cookies

January 2, 2019 |

I decided on the Cookies by Bess Chinese Almond Cookies recipe in honor of the Chinese New Year, which in 2019 is on February 5th. I am posting the Chinese Almond Cookies in honor of our New Year, January 1, 2019. Cookies by Bess has two Chinese cookie recipes. I posted the Chinese Chews recipe about a year ago. It has been one of the most visited blogs so far…I hope this Chinese Almond Cookies are just as popular!

This is the first time I’ve made Chinese Almond Cookies, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I should have Googled the Chinese Almond Cookies before making them. Google has a ton of Chinese Almond Cookie recipes. After looking through several, I found that Grandma Bess’ recipe is the only one with coconut in the ingredients. So interesting! I wish I could ask Grandma Bess where this recipe came from!

I made two slight adjustments to Grandma’s recipe. First, I substituted butter for shortening, as I always do. After baking the cookies, I think this change may have made a texture and consistency difference. It didn’t affect the taste of the cookies though…they taste great!

The second slight change I made was to place a whole almond on each cookie versus half an almond. The last time a recipe called for ½ an almond, I sliced them as directed but then wished I had used the whole almond. This change didn’t hurt the cookie one bit.

I’m rating the Chinese Almond Cookies recipe as 2-stars for cookie difficulty. It’s not hard, but the extra steps of kneading the dough, rolling small dough balls, flattening the balls with the bottom of a glass, and finally adding the almond, makes this a 2-star cookie.

First, I gathered all my ingredients together and got started blending the butter, sugar, egg, water, and almond extract together.

I blended the ingredients together a bit longer than I normally would because the recipe mentions to blend together “very well”. I haven’t seen this in a recipe before, so I made sure to the dough was blended a little longer.

The dough was a pretty good consistency for kneading but seemed to be just a little sticky. Since I hadn’t made this recipe before, I wasn’t exactly sure how the dough consistency was supposed to be. I didn’t add additional flour but now that I’ve made the cookies, I think adding about a ¼ cup more flour may have prevented the cookies from spreading as much as they did as they baked.

I kneaded the dough for about 5 minutes. This is when I noticed it seemed a little sticky. I haven’t seen a cookie recipe that calls for kneading the dough before. Generally, kneading makes the dough airy, chewy, and light. Kneading this dough made it a bit more shiny, but didn’t seem to change the texture of the dough. Another question for Grandma Bess!

After I finished kneading, I started rolling the dough into small balls. I always test bake a few cookies to make sure they bake correctly. The test batch showed me that these cookies spread quite a bit while baking. So, I made sure to keep my dough balls small.

Next step was to flatten the dough balls with the bottom of a small glass. Dipping the glass in flour prevents the dough from sticking to the bottom of the glass. Nice tip!

Finally, time to place the almond on the cookies. They look so pretty!

As I mentioned, the dough balls spread out while baking. Keeping the size of the cookie small helps to make sure there the cookie doesn’t look too big for the almond.

I baked the Chinese Almond Cookies just 12 minutes. Any longer and the cookies started to brown too much around the edges.

These Chinese Almond Cookies are a crunchy cookie that have a great almond and butter flavor. The coconut seemed to melt into the cookie as it baked. I didn’t taste the coconut much at all and it didn’t seem to affect the texture of the cookies.

If you like a crunchy cookie, Chinese Almond Cookies are a winner. The almond flavor blends perfectly with the butter and coconut.

Happy New Year and Happy Chinese New Year to you all!

XXOO,

Janet

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