Okay I must admit, the snow yesterday did bring back memories of Christmas 2013. But, perhaps we’ve been spoiled by never having severe storms that we have become a bit leery of the weather. However, things are back to normal, the sun is out and it is a glorious Canadian winter day – but only 12 days to Christmas and I’m posting number 6. Not to worry, we’ll get there! I realized in researching unusual/different/interesting cookies for this series, there are a lot of common ingredients. No I’m not talking about flour, butter, eggs – but the flavoring ingredients. There are literally hundreds and more cookie recipes that involve nuts – mostly almonds, lemon and coconut. Wonderful ingredients, but I’ve already given a couple of recipes with nuts (and I have a couple of grown nephews who cannot eat nuts), I’ve already given you something with lemon so this one, I decided to use coconut.
There are recipes with almost every different nationality that have used coconuts in their sweets. In our culture, coconut is used almost everywhere in sweet and savory dishes. I did a pink coconut toffee once before – it was something my mum would make every year faithfully for her grandchildren (and my brothers and me before they came along). But that’s just one recipe, there are plenty more. These cookies are really nicely flavored – think macaroon flavor with a biscuit texture. I decorated with some dark chocolate but really it doesn’t need any decoration. It tastes great as is. It’s from my December 2003 Gourmet magazine. It takes a basic cookie dough and adds shredded coconut and although the recipe says to add almond extract, I added vanilla extract.
Ingredients
2 cups sweetened flaked coconut
1/4 teaspoon almond or vanilla extract
Pulse the coconut in a food processor until finely ground. Mix in coconut and vanilla/almond extract after adding flour.
Basic butter cookie ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 sticks (3/4 cup) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon almond or vanilla
Preheat oven to 375F
Whisk flour, baking powder and salt in a medium size bowl – add the coconut mixture – stir to combine
Cream the butter and sugar, add the egg – mix on low just until incorporated, do the same with the vanilla
Add the flour mix until it just comes together
Instead of forming dough into a log and chilling, you can roll tablespoons of dough into 1 1/4 inch balls
Bake, switching position of sheets halfway through baking, until bottoms are browned, about 15 minutes total – but please check around 12 minutes and determine how much longer
When cooled, I melted some chocolate and dipped, dotted and fussed some decorations on top – purely optional, unless you have a blog, then it’s essential, pictured my kids initials (just like when they were kids and I used to make pancake initials for them) and a music symbol for my wife 🙂 – As always – enjoy!
