German cookies for Teachers Day presents 2015

Hands getting itchy again, so I decided to be ambitious and bake some homemade cookies for YX's teachers. Decided on the german cookies that I had been thinking of making since Chinese New Year, but never got round to baking. I had to bake earlier as her centre is having a scheduled holiday the day before the MOE school holiday on Friday. 

I used the recipe shared in the Facebook group, Bakingscorner, and the original recipe is from bakingtaitai. I followed the ingredients list accordingly, and made two batches, one original and one green tea matcha flavour. 

My experience: 

1. I found the dough to be very soft and wet. It was suggested that if the dough was too soft to handle, we could chill it. I thought that would also help while waiting for the oven to be ready, so I placed a tray of shaped dough in the fridge. They ended up having tiny beads of condensation on them, which were visible after baking. 
2. Also, based on the recommendation size of 8g per piece, my cookies came out being quite big (after expanding in the baking process). For subsequent trays, I reduced the size to 6g each for a more manageable bite-sized portion. You can see the difference in size in the second photo. 
3. The picture below shows the matcha flavoured cookies sticking more to the baking paper. Perhaps I did not bake them long enough. (I used the lower end 12 min baking time as I was worried they would be burnt and take on a brownish hue.)

After the cookies cooled sufficiently, I packed them (VERY CAREFULLY) into disposable plastic boxes I had bought from Phoon Huat. I alternated the flavours by layer, and laid each layer on the only doileys I had on hand (5.5 inch round ones leftover from CNY baking). They fitted the boxes perfectly, as you can see in the picture below. 

I ended up having quite a lot extras since I made 2 batches. But I was worried about saving them until Sunday for her church school teachers, and next monday for her music class teacher, so I decided to just let her have all the boxes for her teachers in LifeJourniz. 

Original Recipe Source is http://bakingtaitai.blogspot.sg/2014/06/german-butter-cookies.html.