Life is strange. There was a time when I forgot to put eggs in an omelette, or when I put an incredible amount of salt instead of sugar in a cake. But today I am able to cook and bake all the food that I long for – especially those that taste like home.

These little sticks were not even something that my mother would bake – they were sold in packages in all the grocery stores in a cheap price so we would just buy them ready and eat. And now I see that the ingredients were really easy to find and cheap as well, hence the cheap price of one package. Good.

 

These sticks are nice also that with one portion of dough you can make about 40 sticks – which last quite long. So you can make them and store them and for about a week they can accompany you when you crave for some snacks.

 

I also like dipping the sticks in the tea. When I was a child, I always ate biscuits, cookies or sticks like these by dipping into tea. Some people – especially some children – dip those baked goods in the milk but I never liked milk and I was always allowed to drink tea, black tea.

 

Bake these and at least once, for me, dip it into the tea, will you?

 

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Ingredients:

 

(makes about 40 sticks, each about 15 cm long, max 1 cm thick in diameter)

 

For dough:

1/2 cup / 120 ml canola oil (or olive oil, or any other vegetable oil)
125 gr. butter, in room temperature
Juice of 1/2 lemon (which makes about 1/2 cup / 120 ml juice)
1/3 cup / 80 ml water
1 egg’s white
5 1/2 cups / 1250 ml / 540 gr. cake flour
1 tsp / 5 ml baking powder
1/2 tsp / 2.5 ml salt
1/2 tsp / 2.5 ml brown sugar

 

For sticks’ surfaces:

2 egg yolks
1 package sesame seeds (yes, you really need a lot of sesame)

 

 

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1. In a medium bowl, put oil, butter, lemon juice, water and egg white. Blend them together using your hand, or a hand whisk, or a fork….

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. In another medium bowl, put flour, baking powder, salt and brown sugar and whisk them.

 

 

 

 

 

3. Add the dry ingredients mixture to the wet ingredients and start kneading. Once the dough starts to come together, you can flour your work surface and continue kneading on that surface. Once you have a soft and non-sticky dough, you are done. Cover this dough with stretch film and put it inside the fridge for at least 30 minutes to chill.

 

 

 

4. Once the dough is chilled, take it out of the fridge. In the meantime, preheat the oven to 200C.

 

5. Now prepare an assembly line that consists of the dough, a surface to roll the dough, egg yolk and a brush, a shallow plate to brush the egg yolks on the rolled dough and sesame seeds in another shallow plate.

 

6. Take about 10 gr of dough in your hand. Roll it into a stick that is 15 cm long. Put the stick on the shallow empty plate and brush all its surface with egg yolk. Act fact because the surface that is brushed with yolk sticks to the plate. Once all the surface is brushed, roll the stick on sesame plate to cover it completely with a rich amount of sesame. Put each ready stick on an oven tray covered with a baking sheet. In the photo you can see that my sticks were all different sizes because I wanted them to vary in size. But the amount of 40 sticks that I wrote at the beginning of the ingredients list is when all the sticks are equal in size (which is, as written there, 15 cm long).

 

 

 

 

7. Bake the sticks in middle rack of the oven, for about 25 minutes, or until they are nicely brown. Once baked, take out of the oven and let them cool for a while. Once cool, they are ready to eat (they do not need to cool completely, it is nice to eat them while they are still a bit warm).