I’ve been owing a chocolate post for quite some time now, one that I promised you could use the Best Chocolate Frosting Ever for. When I was young we would get a bag of these little bite-sized cookies from a bakery; they were a big childhood favourite of mine. I always thought they would be way too much effort to make at home, but bakeries in Australia don’t have them, so I decided to look them up and give them a try. It turns out they are quite easy to make and, although not quick, they are definitely not too much hassle on a laid-back weekend day. You have to make them a day ahead though, because they have to soften. I hear they are great for getting kids involved: the forming, sorting and filling provide age-appropriate tasks for any little bakers over 3 years old or so. The recipe is translated from “Csak a puffin”; the pictures are by me.

The amounts listed here will make about 60 vanilla and 120 chocolate half-cookies, which you can use to make some all-chocolate, some mixed and some all-vanilla sandwich cookies. You can adjust the quantities if you want fewer chocolate ones. Amongst my friends the triple chocolate sandwich (chocolate-chocolate with chocolate frosting filling) is the big favourite, but Pink (my husband) loves vanilla-vanilla with apricot jam filling best.

Ingredients

• Flour 370 + 30 g
• Butter, somewhat softened 370 g
• Icing sugar (powdered sugar) 150 g
• Vanilla extract (to taste, if in doubt start with one teaspoon)
• 3 eggs + 1 egg yolk (I know that leftover whites are annoying, but you really need at least one extra yolk. If you like your cookies decadent, replace one of the whole eggs with 2 or 3 yolks.)
• 50 g cocoa powder
• Apricot jam and/or Raspberry jam and/or Chocolate frosting
• Melted dark chocolate for decoration

Directions

Beat the butter with the sugar and vanilla until smooth. Add the eggs and the yolk one by one, mixing, then add the 370 g flour and mix. Divide the mixture into two batches: one batch should be about twice the other. Add the extra 30 g of flour to the small batch, and the 50 g cocoa powder to the other. Flatten both mixtures into “pancakes” on parchment paper, wrap in the paper and put in the fridge for at least an hour.

Line all the baking sheets you have with parchment paper. Take the vanilla batch out of the fridge first, and tear off small bits, form them into little balls between your palms and flatten them slightly. Line them up on a baking sheet a fair distance from each other like this:

Work as quickly as possible so the dough doesn’t soften too much. Put it back in the fridge if needed. Try to make the little cookies evenly sized, which I failed to do, as you can see. Bake in the oven one baking sheet at a time at 180C until the cookies are a little bit cracked, but not browned, about 8 minutes. When done, cool them on a rack (or on parchment paper on the counter if you don’t have one). They will have flattened out a bit and should look like this:

Don’t let them brown at all, and time exactly how long they took: you’ll need to bake the chocolate ones for exactly the same time to make sure they don’t over-bake. Now repeat with the same process with the chocolate dough.

Once the cookies have cooled, use jam or chocolate frosting to stick them together. I prefer apricot jam to raspberry and love the triple chocolate sandwich. If your sizes are a bit uneven, you’ll need to do some pairing work. I line the sandwiches on the rack again, over a baking sheet lined with foil to make decoration easy and no mess, see below.

Now to decorate (obviously the most important bit), melt some dark chocolate. Cut the top off a zip-loc bag as shown, and fill it with chocolate. Then cut the corner off.

Drizzle the chocolate over the cookies in long strokes to make them stripy, like this:

Finally, and this is the hard bit, wait at least overnight before eating them. The cookies have to soften and absorb moisture from the jam or frosting before they become really yummy. On the bright side, they keep in tupperware containers in top shape for at least a week. Beware, they are addictive, and enjoy!