Today's goodie from our Holiday Cookie Chronicles are derived from a traditional Malaysian treat, sugee biscuits. The result is crumbly, buttery confections, baked until crackly topped - the perfect addition to the table during the December holidays.
In Singapore, where my mother grew up and where her extended family still lives, we do the holidays a little differently. Come Christmastime, banana trees and birds of paradise bushes in the yard are strung with twinkly lights. The weather is usually about 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and it thunderstorms at least once a day.
Our family from around the island gathers at my Ammama’s house to share an Indo-Singaporean-Malay-Chinese feast: vats of richly spiced coconut curry with tender rounds of fried eggplant, accompanied by fragrant basmati rice; unthinkably large bowls of, a refreshing cucumber-pineapple-tofu salad dressed with a sweet soy and chile–inflected peanut sauce; serving platters piled high with Teochew-style spring rolls, orThe setup is cornucopian on this day, and other festive days of the year .
To make these cookies, mix together softened ghee and finely ground semolina in a bowl, using a wooden spoon to combine. Then add golden caster sugar, all-purpose flour, and a pinch of baking soda until you’ve got a pliable dough. Form the dough into small balls, then bake them for a relatively quick stint until they reach a pale yellow color . Some families top each cookie with a tiny piece of glace cherry for a bit of color, but ours prefers them without.
As they bake, the biscuits don’t spread much, but are punctuated with a few charming little cracks down the middle as they valiantly try to puff up. Baked, their texture is something like a crumbly, nutty, buttery shortbread, with a distinct melt-in-your-mouth quality—which is why my family also refers to these cookies, lovingly, as Old Man Biscuits. The recipe is utterly simple, perhaps one reason Ammama and her siblings prized it so much.
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