Clay is a great manipulative for coiling into shapes like letters and numbers, as much as it is a means for creating functional pottery. The smooth, soft feel of clay fascinates most people, who are not squeamish with getting a bit dirty, and especially children. Joey and Ezra are quite fond of folding their hands around a blob of turning clay on a potter's wheel; shoving carving tools into a patted ball of clay so as to create a porcupine or pincushion or other needly object; sponging water rings through the clay-covered wheel as it turns and splatters.
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| Joey forming a cup at the potter's wheel. |
Both boys thoroughly enjoy playing with miscellaneous doughs inside the house as much as in the pottery studio. But, it is difficult to find a yummy cookie dough that is as much fun to make and manipulate as it is to eat once it's baked. So, after studying several recipes from Greek cookbooks (who doesn't love "The Complete Greek Cookbook" by Theresa Karas Yianilos), the Internet (which largely provides a plethora of options for roll-out sugar cookies and tons on inedible baker's clay or play-dough), and a mass-letter producing recipe from a Good Apple Teaching Resource book entitled "Rainy Day Fun," in which their ABC "Mud" Cookies (1987:22) inspire more attention, I decided to make my own recipe for Chocolate Alphabet Cookies.
Chocolate is a much loved treat in our household; so, too, are finding letters in everyday items. Of course, my Alphabet Cookies provide a good helping of all-natural cocoa, in addition to some healthier alternatives for baked cookies. But, an even more admirable characteristic of this dough, is that it really is a dough. Perhaps if your preferred method is rolling out and stamping shapes from cookie dough, you could still do that, but the elasticity present in the unbaked state of Chocolate Alphabet Cookies provides the manipulative factor that allows my boys to roll coils that then become alphabet letters and numbers. Their hands (and a baking sheet or four) are the only tools needed, once the dough is made. No cookie cutters (and, not everyone owns an array of alphabetic cookie cutters, anyway), no rolling pins, no flour or powdered sugar to cover the surface, just the soft and pliable wad of cookie dough and two imaginative boys (and their mommy and daddy).
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| Joey with his JOEY chocolate ABC cookies. |
Joey has become a master of forming J - O - E - Y in the clay-inspired cookie dough. Ezra needs more help, but he can already pick out some of the letters. We can create their names, the entire alphabet, and still have enough dough leftover to make fun shapes and objects, like stars, snakes, spirals, geometric shapes, et cetera. The recipe even lends itself well to variations and your imaginative additions: try frosting the baked shapes and donning them with sprinkles, use a flavor other than chocolate as the base, push white chocolate or peanut butter chips into the shapes before they bake, use coconut shavings or walnuts or myriad other additives to create textures or interest (both in taste and sight) to your letters and shapes. The ideas really are endless, but at the core of it is a fun dough recipe you can use as a manipulative to teach your children the alphabet, numbers, basic shapes, and a variety of rudimentary knowledge (e.g. older children could roll out important dates and create an image that represents the important event they need to know, such as 79 AD and an image of Herculaneum covered in mud at the base of Mt. Vesuvius or an array of elephants crossing over the Pyrenees into Italy for 218 BC during the Second Punic War when Hannibal crossed the Alps to attack the Romans).
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| Ezra displays his EZRA chocolate ABC cookies. |
And, without further ado, the recipe...
CHOCOLATE ALPHABET COOKIES
Ingredients:
2/3 cup whole wheat flour
2 1/3 cups all purpose flour
1/4 cup milled flax seed
1/4 cup ground almonds
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
dash of nutmeg
2 hard-cooked egg yolks (see step 1)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup cold unsalted butter
1/4 cup coconut oil
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Directions:
1. After covering two eggs with water in a small saucepan, bring them to a gently rolling boil. Continue boiling for 10 minutes. Turn the stove's burner off and let set for 2 minutes. Then, drain the water and spray the eggs with cold water for a minute or so. Then peel the eggs and separate the yolks from the whites. Let your children eat the whites while you, after acquiring a small bowl and a fork, mix the egg yolks into the brown sugar. Set aside.
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| Dry ingredients mixed with hard yolks, sugar, & butter. |
2. In a large bowl, add the flours, flax seed, ground almonds, cocoa powder, cinnamon, salt, and nutmeg. Stir together. Then, cut in the butter until it is well incorporated.
3. Add the oils, sugar with yolk, honey, eggs, and vanilla extract, mixing together well.
4. Knead the ingredients together, starting out in the bowl, then turning the dough onto a clean tabletop.
5. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
6. Once the dough is formed, pinch some off, roll into a coil, and shape accordingly. Nota bene: it is easier to shape the letter or number on the baking sheet rather than transferring from the tabletop to the sheet and especially so if the shape is particularly large. Coils should be about the size of your little finger, unless you want giant shapes.
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| Shapes before baking. |
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| Wet ingredients ready. |
7. At this point, you can add any extras to the designs, such as chocolate or peanut butter chips, various nuts or candies, shredded coconut, etc. Or you can wait until they are baked and decorate with frosting and other additives.
8. Bake in a preheated oven for about 10 minutes (adjusting bake time based on thickness of coils). Then, cool. You can store these in an air-tight container or zipper bag, preferably in the refrigerator for longer lasting use.
Once your Chocolate Alphabet Cookies are cool, use them to spell words, practice visualizing the alphabet song, or just to see what letters your child knows. If you made upper and lower case versions of the letters, play a scrambled matching game to see if your child can match the big and little letters. If you made numbers, use them for addition, subtraction, multiplication tables, a number line, or a wide array of mathematic considerations. Let your imagination soar and introduce your cookies into aspects of education you may never before have considered! And, please do share how your family uses this recipe.
