Spotted Cow Cookies - for Chinese New Year

This is week 2 on the Chinese New Year cookie making activity.  Since baking out the Pistachio Butter
Cookies, I thought I'll try some more butter cookie recipes.  Surfing the net recently for inspiration, I
came across some old posts on German Butter Cookies.  Apparently, these were quite the rage amongst bloggers 2 years ago during CNY.  Yeah, so sue me for being slow.  Slowly but surely, as a colleague is fond of saying.

So 2 years on, I decided to try these marbled variation on the German Butter Cookie recipe from Ancoo Journal.  As the cookies turn out, I'm reminded of those black-white dairy cows.  So I'm calling these cookies "spotted cows" :)  Udderly cute looking, maybe I'll stick some horns on them the next time. 

This recipe uses quite a high ratio of low-protein flour, so the cookie has quite a melt-in-the mouth
texture.  If you prefer a crisper texture, I'd recommend that you use less potato flour and replace with
plain flour.  I didn't have potato flour as well, so I substituted it with corn flour which works just as
well. 

Dear readers, Kong Hei Fatt Choy and may the year of Dragon bring you roaring success.  Peace and happiness to all.

Recipe from Ancoo Journal - makes about 4 dozen
Ingredients :250g butter
80g icing sugar, sifted
250g potato starch or corn flour
160g plain flour, sifted
20g cocoa powder, sifted

Method :

1.  Beat butter and icing sugar till fluffy and lighter in color.
2.  Sift in potato starch and flour, mix to form a soft plain dough and set aside.
3.  Divide mixture in 2.  In a separate bowl, stir in the cocoa powder into one half of the mix to form the
chocolate dough.
4.  Divide plain and chocolate dough into 4 portions.
5.  Roll plain and chocolate dough separately into long strips. Using 1 tsp measuring spoon of plain and
chocolate dough, wrap them around each other with your hand and place on a lined baking tray and gently press dough with your finger.
6.  Bake at preheated oven at 170C for 13-15 minutes depending on the size of your cookies.
7.  Leave to cool completely and store in airtight container.

Wonderful with glass of cold milk. 

Notes :
It's easier to work with chilled cookie dough, so I kept the dough in the refrigerator for about 10 minutes before I rolled them out.   If like me, you have a teeny oven and making small batches at a time, keep the excess cookie dough chilled when not working on them.