Happy middle of the week!

I feel like I burnt myself out a little this past weekend. Having been out of town for a while, I felt deprived of home cooked meals and may have overcompensated for it by cooking up a storm this weekend. All in all, I was still trying to finish up in the kitchen at 10:30pm on Sunday night. Some of the things I made: home made butternut squash gnocchi with pork meatballs and kale, 3 batches of almond milk, buckwheat granola (so good!) and these cute little home made Oreo cookies!

The cookie recipe came from my recently acquired Bouchon Bakery book.

The cookies are essentially chocolate shortbread with a white chocolate ganache filling. They are a bazillion times better than store bought Oreos (but I may be biased since I don’t like store bought ones to begin with). I think the success of these cookies comes from using really good quality cocoa. I used Valrhona cocoa which I purchased from Provisions by Duchess in Edmonton. The result was a very rich chocolate taste – definitely worth using a fancier cocoa. The recipe talks about using Guittard Cocoa Noir which makes a really dark, almost black cookie. Since I didn’t have this cocoa and wasn’t overly concerned with the colour of my Oreos, I opted out of searching for the Cocoa Noir. Either way, I think my batch turned out dark and pretty.

Before you guys jump right into making these cookies… a word of warning. This isn’t a recipe where you just combine everything in a bowl and throw it in the oven. I found the dough was very sensitive to temperature changes and I was constantly chilling the dough, having it warm up too much and become too soft, chilling again, etc. etc. So be prepared to spend some time running back and forth from the fridge or freezer. Same thing goes for the ganache filling – I found that it was a bit difficult to work with, would warm up in the piping bag in my hands and become too runny very quickly. I tried to work in small batches and keep the filling from overheating.

Also, I know that salt brings out the other flavours in baking, but I found the salt content a bit too high for my taste in these cookies so the recipe I’ve posted has been adjusted a bit.

The ingredients in the recipe are listed in very specific gram amounts… like 161 grams. I really believe that using your kitchen scale to accurately measure ingredients makes a huge difference in your final product. And the Bouchon Bakery book has a whole section on the merits of measuring ingredients – if the professionals say its worthwhile… it must be true However, since some kitchen scales (such as my own) can’t accurately measure very small weights, I have provided the approximate volumes for a few of the really small weights below.