Today, I am making low calorie cookies and thought I’d share the recipe with you all 🙂 These Greek koulourakia are made with cinnamon and orange zest and are utterly aromatic. Optionally, you can add ground clove to the mix. The dough requires very little and gentle mixing (by hand) to ensure the cookies are soft and fluffy.
As the recipe uses olive oil and no milk, eggs or butter, these cookies can be enjoyed when fasting too – according to the Greek tradition before Easter or Christmas, for example. I bake these cookies all year round and make them tiny, in the typical Greek Easter shapes of koulourakia, such as the braid and the round shapes that you see here.
INGREDIENTS
1 cup of extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup of lager beer (in room temperature)
1/2 cup of plain (white caster) sugar
3 and 1/2 cup of flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves (optional)
sesame seeds (optional)
zest of one orange
PREPARATION
Using a mixer, blend the olive oil with the sugar.
Add all the other ingredients (except for the sesame) and mix well BY HAND. Do it gently and only a little to ensure the dough remains soft. As soon as you cannot see traces of flour in the mix, it’s ready.
Take a bit of the dough at a time and roll it in a long shape on the counter, then make round and braid shapes. You will find that the more you work a piece of dough in your hand, the more it will harden, so be quick to make the shapes.
Place the cookies, on a baking sheet, in the shallow tray of your oven. Preheat at 160 degrees C and bake for just 25 minutes, ideally using the air-only function. Place the tray on the second shelf from the bottom of the oven.
If using sesame seeds, sprinkle some on the cookies before baking.
This recipe makes enough dough to bake cookies in 2 batches. The second batch won’t fill the shallow baking tray of your oven so you can use a smaller baking tin to put them in and have them ready to bake when the first batch is done.
Enjoy!
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