My daughter Megan is currently in Year 4 at school (she recently turned 9). Her current school project this term is learning about Greece, both Ancient and Modern. For homework this week she was set the task of cooking some traditional Greek food and taking it into school for everyone to try. Megan’s a fairly fussy eater, as a lot of kids are. Therefore we decided we needed something that would appeal to the majority, as well as something that wouldn’t take too long, or require complicated ingredients. It didn’t take much searching, until we landed on the recipe for “Koulourakia”.

The ingredients are really simple and basic. This is the recipe we used:

225g butter, softened
150g caster sugar
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
340g plain flour
1 egg, beaten

Making the biscuits is just as easy! Mix together the butter, sugar and egg. Once mixed, add both the vanilla extract and almond extract. Finally, slowly add the flour, mixing to a dough.

Take amount a teaspoon amount of mixture and place on a lightly floured surface. The mixture should make approximately 48 biscuits but of course this depends on the size you make each one.

Traditionally the biscuits are in a sort of S shape, or apparently like wreaths (I have no idea what this would look like!). Above you can see the basic technique for making the biscuit shape. A dollop of mixture, rolled out into a sausage shape. Then take one end and roll it one way, the other end rolled the other way.

Myself, Megan and Chris all had a go at these shapes. We weren’t that great to be honest!

However 30 something biscuits later, we were definitely getting more of a hang for the shapes. The biscuits are fairly quick to cook, taking around 10-15 minutes, basically until they are golden brown. (Megan just pointed out that I didn’t mention brushing the biscuits with beaten egg – that’s why its on the ingredients list in case you were wondering!)

The biscuits raise a little and spread out a little too. This is more of a warning when you’re putting them onto baking trays! I used baking parchment, though I would think you could grease the trays too. Once baked the biscuits came off very easy, no breakages at all!

So these were our Koulourakia biscuits! They were very nice – sort of soft plain biscuits, with a mild almond after taste. They reminded me a lot of marzipan but I imagine that was just the almond extract.