This one actually has a story, so here’s your chance to JUMP TO THE RECIPE
As a little girl, there was nothing I liked more than going into an Italian bakery with my Nana, because the people at the counter almost always treated children to a circular, flower-shaped butter cookie with a glace cherry or, even better, a reddish-pink or kelly-green leaf cookie bottomed in chocolate and cookie-crumbles or, the ultimate, two leaf cookies sandwiched together with chocolate. (These were pink and green coloured butter cookies, not pistachio or strawberry flavoured, btw.) The adoration hit a whole new level when my husband and I were dating and stopped for the same leaf sandwich cookies at a Ukrainian bakery in Chicago. Our love in a cookie.
Blaise’s Advent request this year was to find or bake those Italian (and Ukrainian!) bakery cookies. I’ve never seen them in Toronto. (If you have a lead, let me know!) And finding a recipe has been rather difficult. The main problem seems to be that recipeople expect you to PIPE soft butter cookie dough into leaf shapes. Sure, the little butter flower cookies with the glace cherries were more of a spritz. And Deb Perelman’s corrugated-lengths of piped bakery butter cookies look oh so fab. But I’m positive the cookies of our bakery love-story are molded, not piped. Now, It’s easy, these days, to find a leaf-shaped cookie-cutter that will impress a similar veining into the top of the cookie. [We used the green leaf in this $13 set of 4 leaf plunger-cutters from Amazon.] But the problem lies in keeping the impression in the cookie when you’re using these softer bakery-style butter cookie recipes.
My solution came via rabbit-holing, not re Italian butter cookies, but shortbread. A dear friend told me about her family’s love of the Robin Hood shortbread melt-away, and I immediately looked it up to have a glance at the cookie that brings such joy. Reading about the melt-away and then about shortbread in all its forms made me think of the consistency of our leaves. The icing sugar in shortbread (and cornstarch, but I’m not gonna use cornstarch, here) might be a good swap for some if not all of the granulated sugar in a butter cookie, presenting a potential solution to the leaf-vein-retention issue. Equally, I assumed, a good long refrigeration period before pressing and baking would set me on the path to leafy goodness. So I tweaked several existing softie recipes with confectioner’s sugar and chill-time until I came up with SSJ’s Italian Leaf Cookies.
SSJ’s Italian Leaf Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 cup unsalted butter a bit colder than room temperature, but not straight out of the fridge
- ½ cup granulated sugar
- ¼ cup icing sugar
- 1 egg at room temperature
- 1½ tsp pure vanilla extract
- 2¼ cup all-purpose flour
- ½ tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp salt
- 1 toothpick-dollop each of Red-Red and Leaf Green Gel Food Colouring or 6-10 drops each Red and Green Liquid Food Colouring
- 1 [8oz] box semi-sweet baker's chocolate or 1 bag semi-sweet mini or regular chocolate chips
Instructions
- In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment or in a mixing bowl with a strong spoon or beaters, cream the butter and sugars until fuffy.
- Add the egg and vanilla and mix until incorporated.
- Sift the salt and baking powder in the first measuring cup of flour you add to the wet ingredients.
- Continue to add the flour to the mixing bowl until just incorporated.
- Divide the dough into two balls, setting one ball aside momentarily.
- In the bowl of the mixer or in a mixing bowl, mix the red food colouring into the first half of the dough until the cookie dough becomes a lively, uniform pink-red.
- Form this dough into a disc, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate.
- Clean the bowl of the mixer and paddles or your mixing bowl and spatula and make sure all items are dry.
- In the bowl of the mixer or in a mixing bowl, mix the green food colouring into the second half of the dough until the cookie dough becomes a botanical green.
- Form this dough into a disc, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate.
- Refrigerate the cookie doughs for at least 3 hours.
- Heat the oven to 350℉ and line two to three cookie sheets with parchment.
- On a well-floured surface, working with one ball of dough at a time, roll the cookie dough out into a large rectangle, about ¼ inch thick.
- With a leaf cookie cutter and press, cut and press the cookie dough and place each leaf on the parchment lined sheet. Cut an even number of cookies so that they may be sandwiched in a later step. Re-roll the cookie dough as necessary to fill one sheet at a time. Feel free to keep the dough in the refrigerator between batches.
- Bake cookies for approximately 11 minutes, until golden or just brown on the edges.
- Allow cookies to cool on the pan for a few moments before moving the cookies on their parchment to a wire rack.
- Cool cookies completely before sandwiching.
- *Temper the chocolate by chopping it into small bits, placing ¾ of it in a microwave safe container, microwaving that ¾ of the chocolate in 20 second bursts at medium heat until just melted, then stirring in the remaining ¼ of the chocolate so that it melts on the spot.
- Lay a leaf cookie bottom-up on a piece of parchment and use an icing spreader or butter knife to dab on enough chocolate to sandwich one cookie with another. Alternatively, you can dip the bottom-side of a cookie into the bowl of tempered chocolate and then lay it chocolate-side-up on the parchment.
- Make the sandwich by placing another leaf cookie face-up onto the chocolate covered cookie on the parchment.
- Repeat until all cookies are sandwiched.
- Allow to cool completely.
- Enjoy!
Notes
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