Dear friends, welcome back! The Light and Tasty section resumes publications after the Christmas break, you missed us, tell the truth! 😃 Introducing my first Monday recipe of the new year: simple, delicate, fragrant, soft mandarin cookies. 🍊

It’s a new variant of those spoon-dropped cookies that, as you well know, are one of the staples in my house. 😊 Today, after previous versions with apples, plum jam, fresh figs, and the anti-waste version with leftover squeezed oranges and lemons, I wanted to try them with one of the quintessential winter fruits, mandarins (actually, to be precise, I used a mix of mandarins and clementines).

They turned out very, very, very good, delicately flavored, fragrant, perfect for dunking. 😋

Like most previous versions, these soft mandarin cookies are egg-free, made with few simple ingredients, ready in minutes.

They are treats with a texture midway between cookies and mini-cakes, so easy to make that you can prepare them with children. They can be placed in their school bag or for an outing without fear of crumbling.

And then, I’ll tell you, they’ve been a hit with a grown-up former child… who doesn’t eat mandarins! 😅 Well, I couldn’t have gotten better feedback than that! 😃

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Difficulty: Very Easy
Cost: Economical
Preparation time: 10 Minutes
Portions: 15-25 cookies
Cooking methods: Oven
Cuisine: Italian
Seasonality: Autumn, Winter

Ingredients

1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup rice flour
3/4 cup mandarins (only pulp, weighed peeled)
3 tbsp raw cane sugar
1/4 cup milk kefir (or yogurt)
2 tbsp corn oil
2 tsp baking powder

Tools

Bowl
Spatula
Chopper
Parchment paper
Spoon or Teaspoon

Steps

Pour kefir (or yogurt), sugar, and oil into a bowl.
☝ You can also use plant-based yogurt, making the recipe vegan.
Mix with a spatula to dissolve the sugar.
Peel the mandarins, remove the seeds, cut the segments into coarse pieces and blend briefly in a chopper, leaving the blend with visible pieces.
👉 Alternatively: squeeze the juice, then take out all the residues with a teaspoon and add them to the mixture. In short: all the mandarin pulp must be used.
Pour the mandarin blend into the bowl.
Optional: flavor by also adding the grated peel of a mandarin (I used a clementine because the mandarin peel was shiny and I wasn’t sure they were untreated).
Mix.
Pour the two flours and the baking powder.
Mix.
👉 You should get a thick but soft mixture, neither liquid nor too compact. If necessary, adjust with small amounts of flour (rice or wheat, your choice).
Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
☝ Tip: if you want to achieve crunchier cookies, use a teaspoon to make smaller cookies, while using a tablespoon results in larger cookies more like mini-cakes.
The number of cookies you get naturally depends on their size (if large, 15).
Bake at 350°F (180°C) for about 25 minutes.
And here’s the mini-cake inside: 🤩
Remember these soft cookies keep their crunchy crust for several hours after baking, then the residual moisture makes them soft and similar to small cakes the next day.
Make them right away for a snack! Or for tomorrow morning’s breakfast, if you haven’t finished them all! 🤩