Swedish Chocolate Bread

Quite similarly to Finnish bread, these Swedish chocolate breads are really cookies. And no, I don't know if they are from Sweden. Actually in this case, I'm not even sure they are particularly for the Christmas time - but I like them a lot so I talked Mrs. Throat-Erator into making them. They are quite similar to the Finnish bread, but with some important differences.

Ingredients:
- 300 g (11 oz) flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 200 g (7 oz) sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla sugar [1]
- 2 tbsp cocoa
- 200 g (7 oz) butter
- 2 eggs
- 50 g (2 oz) almonds
- 2 tbsp washed raw sugar [2]

The flour, sugar, vanilla sugar, cocoa, and baking powder was mixed in a bowl. The butter was cut in small pieces and worked in the flour mixture using fingers. One of the eggs was added the dough was formed using hands - it's a little soft. The dough was left in the bowl in the fridge for half an hour.

The dough was parted in 5 equal portions, each of which was rolled into rods - so long as to fit the baking plate on which they were then placed (on baking paper). Each rod was flattened until about 4 cm (1 1/2 inch) wide. They were then brushed with the other egg [3], and a mixture of finely cut almonds and raw sugar was sprinkled on top.

The large rods were baked at 175 C (350 F) in the top of the oven for about 10 minutes - they were rather soft (fudge like) when we took them out, the rods were immediately cut into smaller rods and allowed to cool before collecting them. This made us 75 cookies.

[1] see here for details.
[2] any kinds of sugar that comes in large crystals would do.
[3] actually this should have been only egg white, but we decided it didn't make that great of a difference.