Salty Black-and-White Sesame Cocktail Cookies

Made it? Rate it!
sesame seed cookies
Salty! Savory! Sweet! All in one cookie!

Like the Gozinaki we made just the other day, this recipe comes from Dorie’s Cookies, by none other than Dorie Greenspan. In the beginning of the book, she covers fairly standard cookies, chocolate chip and similar ilk, but, later in the book, she has a number of different-sounding cookies, such as Gozinaki, and this one for a partly salty, partly savory, and partly sweet cookie. We were intrigued. So, we made up a batch.

We’ve mentioned before that we like to bring little treats to our fellow volunteers who support the Monday downtown walk, but, we figure, lots of people make great chocolate chip cookies, or oatmeal cookies, or other sort of standard cookies. Let’s try something different, like these cookies.

We will tell you that we modified the recipe ever so slightly from the one listed in the book. We reduced the amount of sesame seeds used (we think it said 40g but that’s way too much).

Salty Black-and-White Sesame Cocktail Cookies

Servings: 48 cookies
Author: Shawn

Ingredients

  • 140 g all-purpose flour (1 cup)
  • 75 g almond flour (3/4 cup)
  • 66 g sugar (1/3 cup)
  • 1 tsp sea salt
  • 1 stick butter, cold and cut into 1/2-inch cubes (1/2 cup or 115 g)
  • 1 egg well beaten
  • 4 g mixed black and white sesame seeds enough for sprinkling

Instructions

  • Place the flour, almond flour, sugar, and salt in the bowl of a food processor. Run for 30 seconds or until everything is well mixed.
  • Place butter cubes on top and run for 30 to 60 seconds or until all butter is incorporated. Note: it will not form a dough.
  • Turn mixture out onto a clean work surface and knead until you have a dough that sticks together, about a minute.
  • Place dough between two pieces of parchment and roll to a thickness of 1/4 inch. Place on a baking sheet and freeze for at least 1 hour.
  • Use a 1 1/2-inch cookie cutter to cut out as many cookies as possible, placing them on a baking sheet as you work. Re-roll and cut more cookies from the scraps. Place cookie rounds in the freezer for another 30 minutes.
  • Preheat oven to 350°F. Line baking sheets with silicone baking mats or parchment.
  • Brush cookies with egg, then sprinkle with sesame seeds, lightly pressing seeds to ensure they stick.
  • Transfer to prepared baking sheets, leaving an inch of space between cookies. Bake 20 minutes, or until lightly browned and golden.
  • Let cookies cool on the baking sheet for 10 minutes before transferring to a rack to cool completely.

Ingredient discussion:

If you don’t have almond meal or almond flour, you can make it. Simply place 75 g of almonds (preferably blanched) in the bowl of a food processor and pulse and grind until you have meal. Then start adding flour, etc. Sea salt: do you need it? If you don’t have sea salt, use kosher; if you don’t have kosher, use table.

Procedure in detail:

Process dry ingredients. Place the flour, almond flour/meal, sugar, and salt in the bowl of a food processor and let run about 30 seconds, or until the dry ingredients are well mixed.

making cookies
The mixture does not form a dough in the food processor. We worried about this for a bit, but forged ahead and everything was fine.

Add and process butter. Distribute the butter on top of the dry ingredients and pulse a few times to start cutting it in. Let the processor run for 30 to 60 seconds, or until the butter is completely cut in and the mixture looks like struesel topping. NOTE: The dough does not come together at this stage. It will always look like struesel topping.

sesame seed cookie dough
A minute or so of kneading and the dough looks like dough.

Knead. Turn the mixture out onto a clean work surface and knead the dough until it comes together and you have a dough that sticks together, about 1 minute.

rolled out cookie dough
Placing the dough between parchment sheets makes it easy to roll and transfer to the freezer.

Roll. Place the dough between two pieces of baking parchment and roll to a thickness of 1/4 inch. Don’t worry if the edges are rough or crack a bit. It’ll be fine.

Freeze. Place the dough, still between the parchment sheets, in the freezer for an hour, or long enough to freeze solid.

cutting cookies
Work quickly to try to keep the dough from thawing too much as you cut out the cookies.

Cut. Using a 1 1/2- inch cookie cutter, cut out as many cookies as you can, transferring the cookies to another baking sheet while you work. Re-roll the scraps and cut out more cookies; you should end up with about 48 cookies altogether.

sesame seed cookies
Once we cut out all the cookies, it was back into the freezer.

Freeze. Place the cookies back in the freezer for about 30 minutes, or long enough that they freeze solid.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line baking sheets with silicone baking mats or parchment to make cleanup a snap.

adding sesame seeds
Add just enough sesame seeds to make the cookies look all fancy!

Apply sesame seeds. Brush each cookie with some egg. Not a lot, just enough so that the sesame seeds will stick. Dust with enough sesame seeds to make the cookies look nice, then lightly press them down to ensure they’ll stick. Once the sesame seeds are in place, transfer the cookies to prepared baking sheets, leaving about an inch of space between the cookies.

Bake. Slide into the oven and bake for about 20 minutes, rotating the baking sheets from top to bottom and front to back halfway through.

Cool. Let cool on the baking sheets for about 10 minutes, allowing them to crisp and firm, then transfer to a baking rack to cool completely.

These were a hit with the volunteers; we only had 4 cookies left over. While we strive to have the right amount so we have nothing left, we know that people often don’t want to take the last cookie, so, having only four left is about the best we’ll do. These are slightly salty, making them a little savory, and, with only 1/3 cup of sugar, they’re not too sweet. We will say that we like having the sesame seeds on top. They look great, but they really don’t add too much in the way of flavor. We might suggest that you sprinkle just a touch extra sea salt on top when you add the sesame seeds. They’ll be even better. Five stars!

Worth the trouble?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Recipe Rating




This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.