This weeks bake I was stuck for ideas, wanting to get into something Christmas related but not wanting to bore everyone with getting overly excited about Christmas when it is only mid November. I love Christmas and Christmas baking is one of my favourite things to do, the spices, orange, chocolate, alcohol, dried fruit there are just so many wonderful Christmas bakes. I am aiming to include more recipes on here this year sharing my family favourites, including mince pies which I bake every year without fail and most of them are gone that same day! To start off slowly introducing us into the Christmas spirt I made these Cointreau Wreaths, traditionally Cognac wreaths but I mixed it up to make it my own and not being a lover of brandy mixed it out for orange instead. I based my recipe off a simple Swedish Cake and Cookies book which I received for my birthday back in the summer.
Ingredients
- 2 Cups of Plain flour (Sorry I didn’t convert into grams I just use my cup measurers but if you google you can convert it easily)
- 1/2 Cup of Caster sugar
- 200g Salted Butter
- 2 Tbsp of Cointreau
- Zest of 1 orange
Method
- Mix together the flour and sugar in a large bowl.
- Cut up the butter into small pieces and rub into the sugar-flour mix until it resembles bread crumbs.
- Add the cointreau and orange zest and bring the mixture together until it forms a smooth dough.
- Wrap and place in fridge for 1 hour to harden.
- Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.
- Taking walnut sized pieces of dough roll the dough on a work bench into 10cm long sausages. Be careful not to rip the dough.
- Taking two lengths wrap and twist the strands together and join the ends together to form a wreath.
- Place the wreaths on a baking tray making sure there is enough space between them as they will spread a little.
- Bake in the oven for 10 minutes until golden.
