Practice makes everything perfect!! Long time ago when a local Mall "Parma Town Mall" was still open in early 80s, I used to buy these cookies from its food court from a local Greek place. Believe it or not they used to sell these for 40 cents a piece. I was in love with these cookies. In those years I first tried baklava too and I loved them too. I perfected the recipe for home made baklava and once I was baking them I spilled oil on my home written recipe. This is how decided to put my recipes on the word document. Then a dear friend of my gave me idea to create my own blog. It was 2010 when started blogging. All this time I was still looking for a good authentic Greek recipe for Finikia . Finally one day in 2007 one of my Greek friends who owned a local Greek restaurant gave me her recipe with and without eggs. Since then I have made these many times but some how did not post step by step with pics on this blog. I admit that when I first started blogging I did not post as many pics. Now I am all about pics, as I do not care for the video recipes when they lot of talking. 
So my dear friends and readers, this time I am going to post both the recipes with and without eggs with some modification that I have made over years. This recipe is without eggs which comes out as good as without eggs. You can make this recipe with filling of walnut and sugar but I decided to add the filling to my recipe with eggs. Hope you like it.
Her is something I found on Wikipedia about the Greek cookies finikia : "This cookie is made using flour, baking powder, orange juice, and oil. No
dairy products are used. After baking in the oven, the finikia are
rolled in a mixture of cinnamon, sugar and ground walnuts. Melomakarona,
another type of Greek cookie dessert, is made with the same
ingredients, but after baking, is dipped into a syrup mixture consisting
of sugar, honey, water, orange zest, and cloves. Then it is rolled in
the ground walnut, sugar and cinnamon mixture."So here is the recipe for Finkia without eggs.
Ingredients:
For Cookies:
5 and 1/2 cup of AP flour
1 cup of Almond flour ( I made this variation this time, before I used to use only 6 and half cups of regular flour)
2 teaspoon of cinnamon powder
1/2 teaspoon of clove powder
1 teaspoon of salt
2 teaspoon of baking powder
2 teaspoon of baking soda
1 and 1/2 cup of oil (I used vegetable oil, my Greek friend gave me the recipe to use Olive oil)
1/2 cup of butter (1 stick)
3/4 cup of sugar (I used cane sugar)
1/3 cup of Brandy (optional) (I did not use it )
2 teaspoon of vanilla extract
- 1 cup of Honey
- 1 cup of sugar (I used cane sugar)
- 1 cup water
- 1 thick lemon rind
- 1 thick orange rind
- Juice from 1 small lemon
- 4 whole cloves
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 1 cup of finely chopped walnuts
- 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon powder
- 1/4 cup of sugar
- Pinch of clove powder
If you desire you can use same ingredients for filling inside. I did not fill these cookies but I used the filling for the cookies with eggs that is recipe I am going to post next. I feel that with filling the size of cookies comes out little bigger.
- Preheat the oven at 360 F (will have to turn it down to 350 F to bake, I feel that you loose some of the heat when you open the oven to put the cookies, so I always preheat at 360 F first and then after I place the cookies in oven I immediately reset the temp at 350 F)
- In a bowl mix flour, cinnamon, cloves and salt, (You can either sift them together or with dry whisk just mix it will have the same effect as sifting)
- Take the orange and peel a large piece of rind to save for the syrup, peel the rest to make rind and squeeze the juice from orange with juicer.
- Cut the remaining skin in to small pieces.
- In a food processor mix following with regular chopping blade in: oil, butter, sugar orange pieces and brandy if using it.
- Mix baking powder and baking soda in the orange juice and add this and vanilla to the sugar and butter/oil/orange rind mix.
- The mixture would be something like shown in this picture.
- Now add this to the bowl with dry ingredients.
- Once you have incorporated all the wet and dry ingredients, kneed the dough (using hands) be careful not to over work the dough.
- The dough would be smooth, soft and a little greasy.
- Set the dough aside while you make the syrup.
- Add the syrup ingredients water, honey, sugar, lemon and orange rinds, cloves, cinnamon stick and lemon juice in a sauce pan and place it on stove on medium heat on stove and cook for 10 min, stirring occastionally.
- Remove from stove and set aside to cool.
- Now take the bowl with the dough, shape the cookies by taking two tablespoon of dough in your palms and making a oval shape.
- Place them on baking sheet about 1 inch apart (I used my silicone baking sheet on a metal cookies sheet. )
- Make and indentation on each cookie with back of a fork.
- Bake them at 350 F for 20 min or until the bottom of the cookies are light brown.
- While to one batch of cookies is baking you can finish working on rest of the dough and bake the second batch.
Strain the syrup to take out the rinds, cinnamon stick and clove.
Take a large baking dish and line it up with parchment or wax paper.
Take the baked cookies out of oven and add the hot cookies to the cool syrup 3-4 cookies at a time.
Face down for 20-30 seconds and face up for about 20- 30 seconds. use a slotted spoon.
Adding warm cookies to syrup will allow the cookies to soak the syrup.
Then take the cookies out with this slotted spoon and place them in the baking dish lined with parchment paper or wax paper.
Sprinkle with topping.
Repeat the same step when 2nd batch comes out of oven.
For best taste wait until few hours before serving, this will allow the syrup to be completely absorbed by the cookies.
Store in the air tight container.
These will keep good for 4-5 weeks if they last that long.
I store them in the fridge.
Hint: You can bake the cookies before dipping them in syrup and when ready for a party you can make the syrup and dip the thawed cookies in hot syrup, it will be same as dipping the hot cookie in cool syrup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License
Recipe adapted by Surekha from a recipe given to her by a friend "Maria"
Photographs by Surekha.
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