Michelle Clark’s minor obsession with a dark chocolate–chipotle truffle got her thinking: could it translate into a cookie? The St. Paul, Minnesota, resident kicked the idea around for a few weeks before formulating an unforgettable cookie. “It has fun with your tongue,” she said. “You take a bite and you get one flavor; then you chew and you get another flavor. It’s not just, ‘Here, have a sugar cookie.’” To those who may say that Clark’s unconventional entry doesn’t overtly shout “Happy Holidays,” she has a response. “Sure, it’s not your basic Santa cutout cookie,” she said. “But it has both chocolate and cinnamon, and those are both Christmas flavors to me. Besides, to have the scent of chocolate and cinnamon in the oven, well, what’s more Christmas than that?”
A last-minute need to fill out a holiday cookie tray found Kay Lieberherr of St. Paul, Minnesota, turning to the palmiers at Surdyk’s in Minneapolis. “It turned out that everyone asked for the recipe for the palmiers, and not for the cookies that I had baked,” she said with a laugh. That response sent her on a mission to develop her own palmier recipe. Using commercially prepared puff pastry makes this recipe a snap to prepare. “I love it when you don’t spend a lot of time on something, yet people think, ‘Wow, that must have taken days,’” said Lieberherr.
Recipe by Agatha Kulaga & Erin Patinkin of Ovenly | Introduction by Food52's Kristen Miglore
Recipe introduction from Food52's Genius Desserts by Kristen Miglore:
Espelette pepper’s mild heat and subtle fruitiness make it an excellent companion to chocolate. Chefs in the Basque region of France tend to use it in chocolate mousse or layer cakes, but here I add it to an easy cocoa drop cookie, based on a recipe by Sally Sampson of Chop Chop magazine. Note that the butter and the eggs both need to be at room temperature, so don’t forget to set them out at least half an hour before you want to start mixing.
Most recipes call for using a stand mixer, but we found this counterproductive to our goal of chewy, dense cookies because the mixer beats air into the dough. Instead we make our dough by hand, melting the butter for easier mixing.
Rich and decadent, the recipe for these luxurious cookies was the result of a visit to Café Ilio, an artisan chocolatier in northern Tehran, run by husband and wife team Sahar Hossein-Najari and Mehrdad Aghameeri. The pair spent six years travelling around Belgium, France and Italy, honing their craft, before introducing Iranians to the wonders of fine chocolate, incorporating traditional ingredients – like saffron, pistachio and cardamom – into a whole new world of truffles, macaroons, jams and cakes. Thanks to their winning combination of dark chocolate and sour cherries, these cookies are loved by adults and children alike.
No need to chop the peanuts here–you want them in the mix all nice and chunky. The mixer should break them up just enough.
Thin and crisp with a cinnamon-sugar sprinkle, these are a cross between Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal and supermarket graham crackers. Unlike store-bought ones, these are a hundred percent whole grain.
People serve many kinds of cookies and candies to guests on Chinese New Year. Walnut cookies are often included.