A cookie or biscuit is a baked snack or dessert that is typically small, flat, and sweet. It usually contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of oil, fat, or butter. It may include other ingredients such as raisins, oats, chocolate chips, or nuts.
A biscuit, in most English speaking countries, is a flour-based baked and shaped food item. Biscuits are typically hard, flat, and unleavened. They are usually sweet and may be made with sugar, chocolate, icing, jam, ginger, or cinnamon. They can also be savoury, similar to crackers. Types of biscuit include sandwich biscuits, digestive biscuits, ginger biscuits, shortbread biscuits, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate-coated marshmallow treats, Anzac biscuits, biscotti, and speculaas.
Shortbread or shortie is a traditional Scottish biscuit usually made from one part white sugar, two parts butter, and three to four parts plain wheat flour. Shortbread does not contain any leavening, such as baking powder or baking soda. Shortbread is widely associated with Christmas and Hogmanay festivities in Scotland, and some Scottish brands are exported around the world.
A cookie cutter in North American English, also known as a biscuit cutter outside North America, is a tool to cut out cookie/biscuit dough in a particular shape.
Ladyfingers, or in British English sponge fingers, are low-density, dry, egg-based, sweet sponge cake biscuits roughly shaped like large fingers. They are a principal ingredient in many dessert recipes, such as trifles and charlottes, and are also used as fruit or chocolate gateau linings, and for the sponge element of tiramisu. They are typically soaked in a sugar syrup or liqueur, or in coffee or espresso for tiramisu. Plain ladyfingers are commonly given to infants, being soft enough for teething mouths, but easy to grasp and firm enough not to fall apart.
Carrot cake is cake that contains carrots mixed into the batter.
A génoise, also known as Genoese cake or Genovese cake, is a French sponge cake named after the city of Genoa and associated with French cuisine. It was created by François Massialot in the late 17th century. Instead of using chemical leavening, air is suspended in the batter during mixing to provide volume.
Bizcocho is the name given in the Spanish-speaking world to a wide range of pastries, cakes or cookies. The exact product to which the word bizcocho is applied varies widely depending on the region and country. For instance, in Spain bizcocho is exclusively used to refer to sponge cake. In Uruguay, most buttery flaky pastry including croissants are termed bizcocho, whilst sponge cake is called bizcochuelo. In Chile, the Dominican Republic and Bolivia bizcocho refers to a sweet dough (masa) baked with local ingredients, similar to the bizcocho from Spain. In Ecuador the dough of a bizcocho can either be sweet or salty. The US state New Mexico is unusual in using the diminutive form of the name, bizcochito, as the name for a locally developed and very popular cookie.
An icebox cake is a dairy-based dessert made with cream, fruits, nuts, and wafers and set in the refrigerator. One particularly well-known version used to be printed on the back of boxes of thin and dark Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers.
Spekkoek is a type of Indonesian layer cake. It was developed during colonial times in the Dutch East Indies. The firm-textured cake is an Indo (Dutch-Indonesian) version of the European multi-layered spit cake. However it is not baked on a rotating spit, and contains a mix of Indonesian spices, such as cardamom, cinnamon, clove, mace and anise. The cake is made of flour and yolk and is rich in butter or margarine.
Mamón are traditional Filipino chiffon or sponge cakes, typically baked in distinctive cupcake-like molds. In the Visayas regions, mamón are also known as torta mamón or torta. Variants of mamón include the larger loaf-like version called taisan, the rolled version called pianono, and ladyfingers known as broas. Mamón also has two very different variants that use mostly the same ingredients, the cookie-like mamón tostado and the steamed puto mamón.
Sponge cake is a light cake made with eggs, flour and sugar, sometimes leavened with baking powder. Some sponge cakes do not contain egg yolks, like angel food cake, but most of them do. Sponge cakes, leavened with beaten eggs, originated during the Renaissance, possibly in Spain. The sponge cake is thought to be one of the first non-yeasted cakes, and the earliest attested sponge cake recipe in English is found in a book by the English poet Gervase Markham, The English Huswife, Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman (1615). Still, the cake was much more like a cracker: thin and crispy. Sponge cakes became the cake recognised today when bakers started using beaten eggs as a rising agent in the mid-18th century. The Victorian creation of baking powder by English food manufacturer Alfred Bird in 1843 allowed the addition of butter to the traditional sponge recipe, resulting in the creation of the Victoria sponge. Cakes are available in many flavours and have many recipes as well. Sponge cakes have become snack cakes via the Twinkie.
A sandwich cookie, also known as a sandwich biscuit, is a type of cookie made from two thin cookies or medium cookies with a filling between them. Many types of fillings are used, such as cream, ganache, buttercream, chocolate, cream cheese, jam, peanut butter, lemon curd, or ice cream.
Camachile cookies, also known as quinamunsil, are Filipino ladyfinger cookies that are characteristically shaped like the fruits of the camachile tree. They are traditionally eaten with hot drinks for breakfast or merienda.
Lenguas de gato are Filipino butter cookies. They are made from butter, flours, sugar, eggs, and milk. Their name means "cat's tongue" in Spanish, after their characteristic oval shape. They are very thin and crunchy.
Kue lidah kucing is a small Indonesian biscuit shaped somewhat like a cat's tongue. They are sweet and crunchy. This cookie is a Dutch-influenced cookie due to the historical tie between Indonesia and the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, this cookie is known as kattentong, and ultimately derived from European cat tongue biscuit.
Kue bangkit is a small biscuit in Malay cuisine made from sago starch, commonly found amongst the Malay communities in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. This biscuit has various colours, ranging from white, yellowish to brown, depending on the additional ingredients.
