Buttery Chocolate-Atta Biscuits

Tasty, Crisp Chocolate-Wheat Flour Cookies

These chocolate atta biscuits are crisp, delicious, and fun to make. They could be some of the best cookies you’ve tasted. No exaggeration. What’s more, they’re made with whole wheat flour. So they’re healthier too. The wheat flour we’re using is the regular, fine, stone-ground atta that we use to make chapatis and rotis.

If you’re the creative type, you’ll enjoy moulding these wheat flour cookies by hand into shapes of your choice. Moulding them is so much like freehand sculpting, like handling ‘play dough’. You could even find the children in your family eager to lend a hand.

Ingredients

1 ½ cup (190g) atta (whole wheat flour)

½ cup + 3 tbsp (150g) butter

7 tbsp (100g) granulated sugar, finely ground

(Or, 100g icing or powdered sugar)

Approx. ½ to 1 ½ tbsp milk

1 ½ tbsp cocoa powder

¼ tsp baking powder

Bake at 160 C (320 F) for approx. 25 mins.

(Check after around 22 mins.)

Could make approximately 22 chocolate atta cookies.

Procedure

1. Sift the whole wheat flour.
2. Then, into a mixing bowl transfer 150g of salted butter. You could use unsalted butter and ½ tsp salt instead. The butter should be at room temperature, but not too soft.
3. To this, add 100g of finely powdered sugar. Creaming the butter and sugar well is an important step in this recipe. Cream these two well with a whisk or wooden spoon till the mix is pale yellow in colour.
4. Next, add in ¼ tsp of baking powder and whip everything well again.
5. Then mix in the whole wheat flour in two parts. Now, working with your hands, try and bring everything together into a shaggy dough. Refrain from trying to knead this dough. Just press it all together into one firm mass.
6. Add some milk, around a teaspoon at a time to ensure we add the minimum amount needed to form a mouldable dough, not a drop extra. You might need anywhere from ½ tbsp to around 1 tbsp of milk. Stop when the dough just comes together. It shouldn’t be a smooth, soft dough.
7. At this stage, transfer the dough to a wooden board. There’s no need to dust it with flour.
8. Divide the dough roughly into two parts. Transfer one part back to the mixing bowl and to it, add 1 ½ tbsp of cocoa powder. To offset the dryness brought about by the addition of cocoa powder, and restore the consistency of the dough, you may need to add around ½ a teaspoon of milk to it.
9. So now, you’ll have a buttery dough and a chocolaty one. Neither of these needs any added flavour or essence. You’ll need a little milk to stick pieces of these two doughs together to make our fusion cookies.
10. Using cookie cutters or simple objects from around the house, like bottle caps, cut out the chocolate-atta biscuits in different shapes. You could also use your imagination and sculpt biscuits in different shapes of your choice. If your dough is of the right consistency, the edges of the cookies or rolled out dough will be cracked. But don’t worry. You could easily neaten the jagged edges by hand. (You’ll find some useful suggestions for crafting different biscuit shapes in the video.)
11. Bake the biscuits at 160 C (320 F) for around 25 minutes. You have to bake these till they’re pale brown on the underside. They’ll be slightly soft when taken out of the oven, but will become crisp very quickly.

Time to bite into your buttery, chocolaty treats.

Enjoy!