Homemade Oreos

If you love Oreos, you might want to try making these little sandwich cookies at home! I use a mixture of standard cocoa powder and intense dark cocoa powder which is harder to get hold of than normal cocoa powder but readily available online. If you can't find it, or don't like the taste of it,  use normal cocoa powder instead.

Makes: approximately 16 cookies

Ingredients

For the cookies:

100g salted butter, melted

80g caster sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

120g self-raising flour

1 tbs cocoa powder

1 tbs deep black cocoa powder

¼ tsp salt

¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda

2-3 tsp semi-skimmed milk

For the filling:

60g coconut oil, melted

50g salted butter, softened

150g icing sugar

Equipment

Large Tala Performance baking tray

Baking parchment

Small Mixing Bowl

Larger Mixing Bowl

Spatula

Sieve

Wooden Spoon

Tala circular cutter, 5cm diameter

Tala sunflower cutter, medium size

Tala Piping Bag fitted with a large open tip nozzle

 Method

1. Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius (320 degrees Fahrenheit) and line a large Tala Performance baking tray with baking parchment.
   
   
2. Place the melted butter, vanilla and caster sugar in the small mixing bowl and mix.
   
   
3. Sift the cocoa powders and the flour into the larger mixing bowl. Add the salt and bicarbonate of soda and whisk to combine.
   
   
4. Mix the wet ingredients into the dry and stir with a wooden spoon.
   
   
5. The mixture will be very dry – continue to stir and add 2 teaspoons of milk to bring the mixture together to form a firm dry dough. Turn out onto the work surface and knead briefly, if you find it easier. Add up to an extra teaspoon of milk if you need to.
   
   
6. Gather the mixture into a ball and roll out between two sheets of baking parchment to a thickness of 2 to 3 millimetres.
   
   
7. Use the Tala circular cutter to stamp out circles. Gather and re-roll the dough until it is used up. You should be able to make about 32 circles.
   
   
8. The dough will not spread much in the oven, so you should be able to fit the circles onto one tray with a small gap between each one.
   
   
9. Use the sunflower cutter to imprint a flower motif on the top of each cookie. (I imprinted the pattern twice, rotating the cutter slightly for the second impression.)
   
   
10. Bake for 10 minutes, then remove from the oven and leave to cool on the baking tray.
    
    
11. Prepare the filling by mixing the melted coconut oil with the icing sugar and then beating in the softened butter.
    
    
12. Transfer the filling to a large Tala piping bag. Pipe some filling onto the centre of a cookie and sandwich with a second cookie, taking care that the imprinted flower pattern side faces outwards. Repeat until the cookies are all paired up.
    
    
13. Enjoy with a glass of chilled milk or a cup of hot tea!