How festive and lovely are these old fashioned soetkoekies? To make these I used my old soetkoekie recipe and added these fun Christmas butterscotch windows. The little windows aren’t just pretty but it gives the overall cookie an extra crunchy texture and delicious caramel flavour. The comforting aromas of cinnamon, ginger, cloves and nutmeg brings back such happy memories of my grandmother’s farmhouse kitchen. Happy baking!

Soetkoekies with festive caramel windows
Recipe makes 45 cookies
4 x (250ml) cake flour
1 ½ cup (375ml) castor sugar
1 tsp (5ml) ground cinnamon
1tsp (5ml) ground ginger
1tsp (5ml) ground cloves
½ tsp (2.5ml) nutmeg
½ tsp (2.5ml) salt
1 cup (250ml) butter, room temperature
¼ cup (60ml) cooking butter, melted
1 tsp (5ml) bicarbonate soda
5 Tbsp (75 ml) luke warm water
1 egg, beaten
15 butterscotch sweets

Sift the flour, salt and spices together. Add the sugar. Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Dissolve the bicarbonate soda in the water and add to the beaten egg. Add the egg mixture to the flour mixture to make a dough. Knead until thoroughly mixed. Divide dough into two, then wrap in cling wrap and chill for at least two hours or overnight. Preheat the oven to 190°C. Roll out the dough (take out of fridge 5 minutes prior rolling out) on a lightly floured surface to a thickness of 5 mm and cut out circles. Use small Christmas motif cutters to cut shapes out of the centre of the circle cookies. (You can re-roll any extra dough to make more cookies). Put the dough circles on a lined baking tray. Using a pestle and mortar, crush the butterscotch sweets into a course powder, then fill the holes with the crushed sweets. Bake the cookies for 15-20 minutes until the edges have just browned. If you see there is little holes in the window just add a bit more butterscotch and pop back in the oven for another minute or two. Leave to cool on the tray for 5 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack to cool down completely.