'Smiley Poo' Chocolate German Cookies

Requests can get quite bizarre...like this one! Poo cookies!

You must agree you can't help but smile when you see them!

My elder kid laughed when he saw the smiley piles of turd. My little one said "mama, these poo look and smell good!" Hubby smiled when he saw rows of them in the box when he came home from work. How not to laugh or at least smile :p.

This is a really easy bake so my kids were involved. I wanted a more melt-in-your-mouth texture for the cookies so I chose a German cookie base.

The recipe is adapted from Small Small Baker 
Chocolate German Cookies
Ingredients (makes about 10 poo cookies):
63g unsalted butter
20g icing sugar
63g potato starch
40g plain flour
1 tbs (8g) cocoa powder (I used dutch processed but regular cocoa powder will do too)
1/4 tsp fine sea salt

Steps:
1. Beat butter, sugar and salt until light and fluffy. You may use the electric mixer or by hand. I used to cream butter and sugar by hand but I am getting lazy :p.

2. Sift together potato starch, plain flour and cocoa powder.

3. Gradually add flour mixture into creamed butter and mix well until a dough forms using a spatula.

4. Divide into 10 portions, about 18-19g each.

5. Roll into a log of about 18-20cm long with one end tapered.

6. You could prepare a template with 4cm diameter circles to help you make each pile of poo roughly the same size (optional). I used a macaron template for this under the baking sheet. Carefully roll the log into a spiral, using the circle as a reference for the base. The dough is very soft and may break while you are doing this. It takes a bit of practice to get a nice spiral so it's ok if you keep needing to redo the shaping. The cookie won't toughen up that soon!

My kids had fun playing with the dough too! They found the poo shape a little too hard to make so they made bars of chocolate instead using their fingers and a toothpick.

6. Chill the tray of shaped cookies in fridge while preheating oven to 170°C. Bake for 15-18 minutes at middle rack until the surface of the cookies appear dry.

Freshly baked!

Cool completely before adding on royal icing features.

You may use store-bought googly eyes candies or make from scratch like I did. I piped the eyes on a separate tray lined with baking sheet and oven dried using the fan mode for about an hour. Peel the eyes off the baking sheet and stick them on with some royal icing. Pipe a big smile using royal icing.

Let the icing dry thoroughly.

Store in airtight container at room temperature.


With love,
Phay Shing