Chinese New Year Delight: Ribbon Cookies

Okay! This is the last batch of Chinese New Year cookies that I’ve made.

Another favourite of mine: Ribbon cookies!!! I make these using my grandma’s recipe. Unfortunately, the end result is not up to our expectation. We should have add a little bit more butter because the texture is quite floury. (ran out of Planta so we used butter). I’ve recently updated the recipe below.

Ingredients:
600g of plain flour
1 egg
160ml/160g water
100g sugar (I used 90g) – (old recipe uses 8 tablespoons of sugar)
170g butter (old recipe uses 7 heap tablespoons of Planta)

Directions:
To make sugar water:
1. Add sugar and water in a saucepan.
2. Heat until sugar is dissolve.
3. Leave aside to cool.

To make dough:
1. Combine flour with butter/Planta and egg.
2. Knead dough and add a little bit of sugar water slowly. Knead until gluten is formed (like making mee hoon kueh).
3. Rest the dough for at least 30 minutes.

To fold dough into ribbon shape:
1. Take a small amount of dough and roll until about 2~3mm thick. Note: if the dough shrinks back when you rolled it, that means you need to rest the dough more.

2. Cut the rolled dough into strips of about 1cm wide. Overlap 2 strips together and cut sideway to about 2cm long. Slice a tiny hole in the middle of the 2 small strips. The reason we use 2 strips to make a piece of ribbon cookie is because we want the ribbon to bloom when we’re cooking it.

3. Take one end of the strip and fold it inside the sliced hole.

4. This is the end result.

5. A sea of ribbon cookies ready for frying.

6. Fry ribbon cookies in a wok. Notice there are a lot of bubbles? The cookies is done when you see little bubbles left or when it turns golden brown.

This traditional ribbon cookie is not very sweet in one bite. But the more you eat, the sweeter it becomes. If you prefer sweeter taste, add more sugar. I can assure you, it’s pretty addicting.

For variation, you can add sesame seeds.

Additional note:
1. Take a pinch of dough and taste. Add some icing sugar if you think the taste is not up to your par.

I can fill this container full with 1 batch of this recipe. Took nearly 5 hours!!! *sweat*

When I make it again recently (23rd Jan 2018. Tsk have not make this nearly 10 years already), it took me nearly 8 hours. Alone!!! Total dough weight about 1.05kg. Baked cookies weight about 860g.

Enjoy!