4 Cookies to Make this Lunar New Year
peanut cookies, green pea cookies, ear biscuits, and pineapple tarts
Lunar New Year is approaching; I don’t need to look at the calendar to know this. The Asian supermarket in town started playing festive Mandarin jingles as soon as Christmas festivities concluded, and photos of friends making pineapple tarts with their family members are now starting to appear on my social media feed. Cookie-making is a tradition every Lunar New Year. Frankly after baking so many cookies over Christmas and having a really busy start to my year, I’m taking things nice and easy with green pea cookies—though I know that in a few days’ time, I’ll be elbow deep in pineapple jam. Whether you’re in the mood for something fuss-free or a weekend project, here are four cookie ideas for your Lunar New Year gifting.
1. Peanut cookies
Like American peanut butter cookies, these deliver all the comfort of eating a spoonful of peanut butter straight out of the jar but with one key difference. These are made without butter or eggs—oil is simply mixed to a flour, sugar, and ground peanut mixture to form a crumbly dough that barely holds together. I like to press the tip of a pen cap into the cookie dough for a simple pattern that recalls the shape of ancient Chinese coins, but you can also use a fork to create a crosshatch design. Unlike their American counterparts, which have fudgy centres within lightly crisp edges, these are surprisingly delicate cookies which fall apart at the barest pressure, melt, and coat your tongue with their toasty nuttiness. While freshly roasted peanuts produce the most fragrant results, store-bought roasted peanuts will also do the job.
Makes 40-50 cookies
150g roasted peanuts
65g icing sugar
125g plain flour
¾ teaspoon salt
15g soft butter
80g peanut oil
1 egg yolk, beaten with 2 tsp water
Preheat the oven to 160°C.
Combine the roasted peanuts, icing sugar, plain flour, and salt in a small blender or food processor. Grind until the peas are completely pulverised. Tip this mixture into a medium bowl.
Mix in the butter, then gradually add the coconut oil to form a crumbly but cohesive dough. Weigh 7g balls and place these spaced apart on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Flatten slightly and make an indent on the cookies with a pen cap.
Egg wash the cookies and bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until golden brown.
2. Green pea cookies
Green pea cookies are a modern, nut-free variation of the traditional peanut cookies above. The key ingredient is green pea flour, which can be found easily in baking specialty shops in Singapore but less common outside of Asia. To make it from scratch, some recipes recommend a long process of dehydrating frozen green peas in an oven, but a quicker and no less effective method is to blitz the roasted green peas that you can find at the snack section of Asian supermarkets. If possible, select peas with minimal seasoning—unless you intentionally want a savoury note in your cookies (wasabi pea cookies anyone?)—or rinse them quickly under running water and thoroughly pat them dry.
Makes 40-50 cookies
140g roasted green peas
60g icing sugar
140g plain flour
90g melted coconut oil
1 egg yolk, beaten with 2 tsp water (optional)
(*To make the cookies fully vegan, you can thin out honey with some water and use this instead of the eggwash.)
Preheat the oven to 160°C.
Combine the roasted green peas, icing sugar, and plain flour in a small blender or food processor. Grind until the peas are completely pulverised. Tip this mixture into a medium bowl.
Gradually add the coconut oil to form a crumbly but cohesive dough. Weigh 7g balls and place these spaced apart on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Flatten slightly and make an indent on the cookies with a pen cap.
Egg wash the cookies and bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until golden brown.
3. Ear biscuits
Ear biscuits are something out of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation. Ovens were not mainstream in Singapore until recent decades, so many local desserts and snacks were made on the stovetop, mostly by deep-frying or steaming. Known also as pig ear biscuits or cow ear biscuits, these deep-fried snacks are animal-free but named for their striated and golden brown appearance.
Though these cookies are commercially available year round in Singapore, they are traditionally made and gifted during Lunar New Year. Their history go back to the Warring States period in China—when states formed an alliance with one another, the leaders would cut off a cow’s ear and smear the blood onto one another as a sign of their covenant. Ear biscuits have since become a symbolic expression of one’s wishes for the recipient to assume leadership positions or come in first place in their endeavours. As tiny as infants’ ears, these ear biscuits are incredibly moreish. Recipe here.
Pineapple tarts are some of the most impressive and delicious cookies you can make at home, and one of those food items where the homemade definitely trumps what’s store-bought. If you’ve not tasted a pineapple tart, the pastry of pineapple tarts is very similar to tart dough (pâte sablée), with a delightful ‘short’ and crumbly texture; while the pineapple jam is slow-cooked with warm spices until it is firm enough to hold its shape. While it might seem strange that the word “tart” is used to describe a cookie, open pineapple tarts used to be the size of a mini tartlet. Traditionally, one would roll out the pastry, crimp the rim of each dough round to form a little wreath around the jam, and prepare a lattice to top the jam with. When you have a melt-in-the-mouth cookie disc under chewy, caramelised orbs of pineapple jam, it is pretty much the perfect cookie. Recipe here.