Puffy Cheesy Crackers

INGREDIENTS
1 cup of all-purpose flour
4 tablespoons of cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces
8 ounces of grated extra-sharp Cheddar cheese
3/4 teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon of ground black pepper
4 tablespoons of water

DIRECTIONS
Preheat the oven to 350F.
If you didn’t buy shredded cheese, go ahead and grate it now.

Add the cheese to the food processor.

Then the butter.

Followed by the salt and pepper.

Then the flour last.

If you don’t have a food processor you can attempt to put everything into a blender to mix. You have to put the ingredients in with the cheese first and the flour last though, because if you put the flour in first it will spin around and the cheese will hang out at the top with the butter.

Pulse the ingredients in the food processor together until the mixture resembles coarse meal.

Once everything is mixed, add in the water, one tablespoon at a time. The dough will begin to stick and pull from the sides.

Remove the dough from the food processor and form into a ball, then wrap it in plastic to chill for at least 20 minutes in the fridge. The dough will be fine for up to 24 hours if you want to make it ahead of time.

After the dough is chilled, sprinkle a little flour down and unwrap the ball.

Roll out the dough to roughly 1/8″ thickness, then break out your desired shape cookie cutter and go to town. Mini size cutters are best.

Keep cutting and re-rolling out the dough till it is all used up and place your cut-outs on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. They will puff up but won’t spread in width too much, so you can put them fairly close together, about an inch should be plenty.

Bake until the crackers are golden brown, about 15-20 minutes, depending on the size of your cutouts. If they are bigger than mine then bake them longer but keep an eye on them so they don’t burn.

They’ll keep for up to a week in an airtight container and my yield was 91 crackers.

I ended up having to use 3 cookie sheets of varying sizes, and while the second and third sheets were in the oven together (the first was the biggest and would only fit alone), this is what happened to the first sheet: