Psychedelic pinwheel cookies

These cookies are from Gerhard Jenne's Wacky Cakes & Kooky Cookies and have been on my to-do list for forever. Gerhard calls them Bridget Riley cookies but I've looked at her work and I don't think mine look like that ;) Psychedelic pinwheel cookies seemed more appropiate because the basis of the cookies as a pinwheel cookie log. Just for the fun of it I coloured the dough orange and green (I had to resist the urge do do pink and green, my all time favourite). The original is in vanilla and chocolate dough but I thought that would be a little too boring. But in retrospect I think that would have been better.
This was the first time I used icing sugar in cookie dough and I must say that I loved the texture of the cookie (even after kneading for a long time to get the food colouring in), I'm not sure how to describe it other than the type that you would use in a cookie press. Soft but not in a moist way. I liked it a lot!
I like most of the stuff in Jenne's book but I don't think his recipes are very clear. In this recipe it doesn't state if the butter needed to be chilled or not. I used chilled but it took a while before it was mixed. I think leaving it at room temperature for about 20 minutes would be better.

These cookies are my entry to Indigo's Welcome to Wonderland blog party.

Update - I was in a hurry to post this entry to meet the deadline of Welcome to Wonderland and it turned out that the instructions for shaping the cookies was not clear (something I expected ;). English is not my mother tongue so it's always difficult to describe something out of the ordinary. The instructions Gerhard Jenne gives weren't very clear either, and also the instructions don't match the picture. The fact that the instructions were not clear was the reason it took so long to finally make the cookies ;)
I've tried to make the instructions clearer in the recipe...hope it worked ;)
btw I just squeezed the scraps of dough together and shaped into a log and those cookies turned out pretty too :) so don't worry to much about the instructions, you'll get a funny cookie either way :)



Psychedelic pinwheel cookies (adapted from Gerhard Jenne's Wacky Cakes & Kooky Cookies)

makes about 30

175 g (1 ¼ cup) icing sugar
½ ts orange essential oil
1 medium egg yolk
250 g (1 cup + 2 tbs butter), diced
2 ½ cup flour
food colouring
1 egg white mixed with 1 tbs water

Put sugar, essential oil, egg yolk and butter in bowl and mix quickly together with your fingers or a wooden spoon. Add the flour and mix to a firm dough. Divide the dough in two and add some food colouring to each part. Knead in the colouring.
Chill the doughs for 1 hour.
Roll out the first dough between baking paper into a rectangle of about 5 mm (¼ in) thickness. Set aside. Roll out the second dough the same way. Brush one dough with the egg white mixture. Place the second rectangle onto the first. Roll out the two layers until 5 mm (¼ in) thickness. Trim the edges. Brush the top with the egg white mixture.
Starting from the long side, roll up the dough into a log. Cut the log in 3 pieces and then cut each piece lengthwise as well. You'll end up with 6 semi-circular logs. Place 3 of the semi-circular logs more or less in a direct line of each other, cut side down and let them overlap for about 5 cm (2 in). It's best to bend the logs a bit (you'll have to reshape anyway so it doesn't really matter if it looks crooked). Put the 3 remaining semi-circular logs on top of the bottom one in a similar fashion but with the cut side up. Shape the dough with your hands into a rectangular log. Wrap in plastic wrap and chill for at least 1 hour.
Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F).
Cut the log in slices and put them on 2 baking paper lined baking sheets. Bake for about 12 minutes or until starting to brown.