Coconut Butter Thins

Jayne of The Barefoot Kitchen Witch picked this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe: Coconut Butter Thins. For the complete recipe, visit her blog. I look forward to the cookie recipes that people have selected, since cookies are my favorite thing to bake. The introduction to this recipe states that it almost wasn’t included in the cook since the cookies were so delicate. I hoped that they wouldn’t be too bad and got started baking.

These are a variation of a shortbread cookie, with coconut and macadamia nuts mixed in. I only had unsalted macadamia nuts, which are quite bland. We are so used to eating them salted that they taste quite different. The recipe said “don’t be afraid” to use salted macadamias. I just was hoping that using unsalted would be ok, too. I chopped mine in the mini food processor and added a pinch of salt, just in case.

I had read through the recipe and it didn’t sound too bad. Most of the shortbread cookies that I have made bake in a pan like a bar cookie, but these are different. You put the dough in a gallon-sized freezer bag and roll it out to a rectangle. I was a bit worried about this because I had a bad experience in the past with trying to roll out cookie dough to a specific size. When I’m reading a recipe and it says “roll dough into a 11 x 17 inch rectangle” I usually head the other way. In this case, you just rolled the dough to fit the bag, which was really simple. Then you chill the dough for a few hours and then cut away the bag and you have a perfect bit of dough to work with.

My rectangle was a little bigger than Dorie’s, so my cookies were a little bigger and I got 40 cookies rather than the 32 to that recipe specified. I used a pizza cutter and a ruler to cut the cookies, which made the cutting very simple. I think the hardest part was figuring out the math of where to do the cuts. My cookies ended up being 2” x 1.25”.

I placed mine a little too close together on the baking sheet, but I had barely just enough room. I forgot how much cookies with lots of butter can spread! I had a couple of cookies that were joined at the hip because they were too close together, but they easily came apart when I moved them to the wire rack to cool. They look kind of plain, but they taste really good. They are really crumbly and just melt in your mouth.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, page 145.