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.
