Cherry Tea Cakes!!

Recently I've started looking in alternative places to baking books for fun easy yummy recipes. My iPad is great for free or relatively cheap food apps. A while back I downloaded a Betty Crocker app (same as the website) for free and found a recipe for these Cherry Tea Cakes!!

I couldn't resist making them. Mine did not turn out as pink even using 3-4 drops of food color. In fact since they were hardly pink at all I’d probably just leave it out in the future. These were very easy and very sweet! If you don’t like maraschino or cocktail cherries then you won’t like these.

I personally love cocktail cherries so I might be a bit biased when I say I love these teacakes. There are no eggs in these cookies so I would make sure your butter is very soft otherwise you get a sand like texture (learnt this from experience) or add more cherry liquid very little by very little until you get a dough you can roll easily into balls.

There are a handful of other good-looking recipes on this app so you’ll probably see a few more in the upcoming weeks! These are perfect for a lunch box, after school, or teatime treat!! Enjoy!!

Cherry Tea Cakes:

1 cup powdered sugar

1 cup (228g) butter or margarine, softened

2 teaspoons maraschino cherry liquid

½ teaspoon almond extract

3 or 4 drops red food color

2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour (plain flour)

½ teaspoon salt

½ cup drained maraschino cherries, chopped (cocktail cherries)

½ cup (100g) white vanilla baking chips

1. Heat oven to 350°F/180C. In large bowl, beat powdered sugar, butter, cherry liquid, almond extract and food color with electric mixer on medium speed until blended. On low speed, beat in flour and salt. Stir in cherries.
2. Shape dough into 1-inch balls. On ungreased (I lined mine) cookie sheets, place balls 2 inches apart.
3. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until edges are light golden brown. Remove from cookie sheets to cooling racks. Cool 20 to 30 minutes.
4. I melted my 100g white chocolate chips in a microwave safe bowl by stirring after every 10-20 seconds. Then drizzled over with a spoon. You could put melted chocolate in a piping bag or plastic baggy to get a more controlled drizzle.

notes: Betty Crocker website – one thing I love about the site is that it has all the nutritional information for most of the recipes! This link also shows you a picture of the very pink cherry tea cakes...