Holiday cookies with a twist
blue cheese, walnut, and hoshigaki sablés; chai and chocolate chunk cookies; nori and white chocolate langue de chat; malibu-inspired pineapple tarts (vg)
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Holiday cookie boxes are all over my social media feed and so I caved this year and put together my own! I was initially hesitant because our oven is tiny and requires baking the cookies one sheet tray at a time, but it turned out to be surprisingly manageable—I baked 35-50 pieces of four different flavours in a single day (though it felt like an intense marathon!). The key is to keep the cookies simple; minimum effort, maximum reward. Here are the flavours in my cookie box:
1. Blue cheese, walnut, and hoshigaki sablés
I recently made hoshigaki (you can see progress photos here) and wanted an elegant way to showcase them. While hoshigaki is delicious with just a cup of tea, their honeyed sweetness pairs stupendously well with blue cheese and toasted walnut. Rather than incorporating the blue cheese into the dough as salty chunks, I prefer dispersing it throughout the cookie so I cream it with the butter. Without homemade hoshigaki, you can purchase dried persimmons or substitute other types of dried fruit (I recommend dried figs.) Wex’s Iranian colleague, who is a big fan of persimmon, loved this.
2. Chai and chocolate chunk cookies
I’ve been obsessed with chai since my last trip to Singapore, where I was treated to freshly brewed chai by Indian cooks who invited me into their homes for a meal. This cookie dough is made with black tea, freshly grated ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon; and combined with a generous amount of chocolate chunks. The type of black tea that you use matters—I made one batch with English breakfast tea and another with assam tea. While both were good, the cookies with assam tea were discernibly better; you really get that flavour of chai. Here’s another tip that I picked up lately: if you swirl cookies while they are fresh from the oven within a cookie cutter, you’ll get perfectly round cookies. This is also a great corrective for cookies that might have spread out too much during the baking.
3. Nori and white chocolate langue de chat
Nori and white chocolate is a whimsical flavour combination that sounds savoury but tastes surprisingly like cookies and cream. I first tasted it at Tom’s Palette, an ice cream parlour in Singapore, and have fallen in love with it ever since. Langue de chat sounds fancy, but it’s one of the least fussy cookies to make, particularly if you make them as drop cookies. The seaweed features in both the cookie dough and the white chocolate ganache that sandwich the cookies. These don’t keep quite as well as the other cookies—all cookies taste best fresh, but langue de chat tend to lose their signature crunch as they sit (especially if they have been filled like these are)—but these were surprisingly some of Wex’s colleagues’ favourite of the four.
4. Malibu-inspired pineapple tarts (vg)
A sizeable number of our friends and colleagues are vegan, or striving to reduce their consumption of animal products, so I wanted to include a vegan option in the box. Pineapple tarts came to mind because the jam is so delicious in and of itself. These are a spin on traditional pineapple tarts, but the base is made with coconut milk and coconut oil in place of the usual butter. I also spiked the jam with a dash of Jamaican rum.
Blue cheese, walnut, and hoshigaki sablés
Makes approximately 50 cookies
170g soft unsalted butter, diced
100g caster sugar
1 hard-boiled egg yolk, mashed
100g blue cheese, crumbled
½ tsp salt
100g dried persimmons or dried figs, finely diced
100g walnuts, toasted and finely chopped
200g plain flour
In a large bowl, combine the butter, sugar, egg yolk, blue cheese, and salt until well-combined. Add the dried persimmons or dried figs, walnuts, and flour and mix until a dough is formed.
Split the dough in two and roll each into a 4cm-thick log. Chill for at least 1 hour.
Preheat the oven to 200°C. Slice the logs 6mm-thick. Place each dough round on a parchment-lined baking sheet, spacing them out evenly. Bake for 10-12 minutes, or until golden brown. Allow to cool completely before packing into airtight containers.
Chai and chocolate chunk cookies
Makes approximately 35 cookies