Chocolate crescents with gingerbread spice
Chocolate crescents are definitely among my favourite Christmas biscuits! I had never baked them myself before, because at Christmas my mother-in-law usually provided us with a generous batch of chocolate crescents. But she won’t be able to do that for much longer, and besides, after perfecting the recipe for oatmeal cookies, I got ambitious: so here’s my version for chocolate crescents! They get their Christmas flavour from aromatic muscovado sugar and gingerbread or speculoos spice. If you don’t have these spices at home or don’t want to buy them, you can simply season the dough with a little cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. Make sure the chocolate coating is of good quality, with at least 70% cocoa, and that it is melted gently.
Melting chocolate gently on a bain-marie
If couverture gets too hot while melting, it can become brittle or dull. Therefore, you should heat it gently. A good method for this is the so-called water bath. To do this, heat a small amount of water in a saucepan and then place a sufficiently large bowl in the saucepan. The bowl must not have any contact with the water in the pot and the water must not boil, it should only be very hot, so that a little steam is produced. The chocolate should only be melted by the warm steam. Put the roughly chopped chocolate or couverture into the bowl over the bain-marie and let it melt while stirring constantly. As soon as it is liquid, take the bowl away from the pan with the steam and decorate your biscuits with the liquid chocolate coating.
Enough kitchen practice, now it’s time for the chocolate crescents!
Chocolate crescents with gingerbread spice
For approx. 2 baking sheets
- 200 g (vegan) butter
- 75 g muscovado sugar
- 100 g grated almonds
- 190 g flour and some flour for shaping
- 40 g cocoa powder
- 1 pinch of salt
- 2 tsp gingerbread or speculoos spice
For the coating
- approx. 100 g dark chocolate coating
Cream soft butter and sugar with a mixer for 5 minutes. Briefly knead the grated almonds, flour, cocoa, salt and spices into the butter mixture. Cover and leave to rest in the fridge for an hour.
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees (no fan). Scoop out walnut-sized portions of dough with a teaspoon, shape into spindle-shaped rolls between the palms of your hands, bend into crescent shapes and place on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for about 10 minutes until light brown.
Remove the tray from the oven, pull the baking paper with the crescents off the tray. Leave the crescents to cool completely.
Roughly chop the couverture and slowly melt in a bain-marie over a low heat. Dip both ends of each crescent briefly in the liquid chocolate coating, leave to drip off over the bowl of chocolate coating and leave to set on a wire rack.
More recipes for Christmas cookies you find here:
Superfood Cookies: with Tigernuts!
Oatmeal Cookies, gluten-free and low sugar
Vegan Peanut Butter Chocolate Cookies with Orange