Cheese Nips

These little doo-dads are really good and pretty easy to make. I just whipped them up in the regular mixer—they turned out fine.

Ingredients

Directions

Sift together 1 cup flour, baking soda, baking powder and cheese powder in a large bowl. Cut in the shortening with a fork and knife with a crosswise motion until dough is broken down into rice-size pieces. Mixture will still be very dry. Stir in buttermilk with a fork until dough becomes moist and sticky. Sprinkle a couple tablespoons of the reserved flour over the dough and work it in until it can be handled without sticking, then turn it out onto a floured board, being sure to keep 1/4 cup of the reserve flour for later. Knead the dough well for 60 to 90 seconds, and the flour is well incorporated.

Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and chill for at least 1 hour.
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
Spray a light coating of cooking spray on a baking sheet.
Remove the dough from the refrigerator and use the remaining reserve flour to dust a rolling surface.
Roll about one-third of the dough to just under 1/16th of inch thick. In other words—really, really thin. This is important. My first batch was too thick and came out like tiny little cheese biscuits.

Trim the edges square (a pizza cutter or wheel works great for this), then transfer the dough to a lightly greased baking sheet.
Use the rolling pin to transfer the dough. Simply pick up one end of the dough onto a rolling pin, and roll the dough around the rolling pin. Reverse the process onto the baking sheet to transfer the dough.

Use a pizza cutter to cut across and down the dough, creating 1-inchsquare pieces. Use the blunt end of a skewer or broken toothpick to poke a hole in the center of each piece.
Sprinkle a very light coating of salt over the top of the crackers
Bake for 8-10 minutes, mix the crackers around (so those on the edge don’t burn) and bake for another 3-5 minutes, or until some are just barely turning a light brown.

Repeat the rolling and baking process with the remaining dough.
Makes approximately 300 crackers–depending on how thin you roll them. Mine tasted great, but should have been thinner.