Tag Archives: Conversation Hearts

Blonde Chocolate Ganache Sandwich Cookies

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Cookies are my love language. It’s how I show those nearest and dearest to me that I care. I think the ultimate cookie needs to be both beautiful and delicious. While I admire cookies artfully decorated in royal icing, I have no desire to eat them. Too sweet and lacking depth of flavour.

These are the cookie equivalent of conversation hearts. Remember those awful chalky candies? These are much more delicious. Who wouldn’t want to receive a box of these?

We don’t really celebrate Valentines Day in our house, but I’m helpless when it comes to buying baking gadgets. These fondant alphabet stamps work beautifully on cookie dough too. The most challenging part of making these was arranging the letters onto the handle, because you need a mirror image of what you actually want to spell. The part of my brain that understands directions and left and right is significantly underdeveloped, so I struggled with this. I had to arrange the letters and then hold it up to the mirror to make sure it was correct. (I can hear the laughter from my family!)

The filling in these sandwich cookies is a ganache made with blonde chocolate. A ganache is essentially hot cream poured over chocolate and sometimes some butter. It is stirred until the chocolate melts. A warm and fluid ganache can be poured over cake. If you let the ganache firm up, it can be rolled into little balls and dipped in melted chocolate to create truffles, or you can do as I did here, and pipe the ganache onto cookies.

My chocolate of choice here was blonde chocolate. For the uninitiated, blonde chocolate is caramelized white chocolate. You can buy it already caramelized (Valrhona Dulcey), or you can make it yourself by roasting white chocolate in the oven. Buttermilk by Sam has an amazing tutorial on her blog. You could also make a milk or dark chocolate ganache.

Blonde chocolate is less sweet than white chocolate and has an amazing toasted almost caramel flavour. Even white chocolate haters like it!

For the cookie, I used Alice Medrich’s recipe for butter cookies. They are plain, in the very best sense of that word. “Plain” was the ultimate compliment from my dad. These tender yet crunchy cookies perfectly showcase the creamy blonde ganache.

Click here to print recipe for Blonde-Chocolate-Ganache-Sandwich-CookiesDownload

Sweet Talk Shortbread Hearts

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assorted hearts 1I have been wanting to make the cookie equivalent of those candy conversation heats for some time now. You know the ones I mean, they have the taste and texture of chalk, but are kind of cute.necco conversation heartsWhen I went to buy some for the photo shoot, I discovered that SweeTarts also make a version of conversation hearts, and if you’re a fan of that mouthwatering fusion of sweet and tart, you’ll love them. SweeTart HeartsI was thinking of doing an iced cookie, and piping the messages on them, but my fine motor skills aren’t precise enough for detailed piping and besides, my #1 valentine doesn’t like iced cookies. So, onto plan B. I remembered seeing these cookie letter stamps online.

Even though these are a novelty cookie, I still wanted them to be as delicious as possible. I thought I would try making them with a shortbread cookie dough. I used Mindy Segal’s recipe from her exciting and edgy new book, Cookie Love. After making the dough, I rolled it out using my new precision sticks. These have changed my life. I have always had difficulty rolling dough evenly, and then I was reading an article by cookie maven Dorris Greenspan. She was talking about these dough rolling sticks. They come in 1/4 inch, 1/8 inch and 1/16 inch thicknesses. They are genius in their simplicity.Measuring dough strips rolling pin guidesAfter rolling out dough between 2 sheets of parchment, I froze the sheet of dough before cutting out the hearts. cutting out heartsI stamped the cookies with their messages before baking, but as soon as they were done I realized that would not work. The cookies puffed up a bit during baking and the letters were not crisp and clear anymore. I decided to try stamping the cookies immediately after baking, before cooling, while they were still soft. To make it manageable, from a timing perspective, I only baked 6 cookies at a time, so that the cookies would not harden before stamping. cookie stampsThese cookies are both adorable and delicious. I was thrilled with the results.hugs xoxo

Click here to print recipe for Sweet Talk Shortbread Hearts.

assorted hearts 2