These cookies are a combination, with slight variations, of a recipe for sesame cookies from The Foods of Vietnam, by Nicole Routier and vietnamese peanut cookies from Home Baking by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. I think they are especially nice with flowery and smoky teas, like jasmine pearl, and puerh, as well as with English style black teas with milk. With fruity teas, I think it is nice to have something saltier for a snack- about which, more later.
Makes about 4 dozen cookies:
3/4 cup toasted sesame seeds
2 1/4 cups sifted unbleached all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 cups vegetable shortening, butter, or lard
1 cup palm sugar
(regular white or light brown sugar may be substituted)
2 whole eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
flour for dusting
1 egg yolk mixed with 1 tbsp water
approximately 25 unsalted dry roasted peanuts, halved
Preheat oven to 350. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment or silpats. Reserve 1/4 cup sesame seeds, coarsely grinding the rest in a mortar or coffee/spice grinder. In a bowl combine the ground seeds with the flour, baking powder and baking soda. (Or, you can put the toasted seeds and flour and other dry ingredients together in a food processor, and pulse it to combine and grind.)
In another bowl, mix the butter and sugar, cream until fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, and the vanilla, beating until smooth. Add the dry ingredients a bit at a time, and mix it up well. Put some flour on a board or the counter, and knead the dough into a smooth wodge. For each cookie, roll about 1 tsp of the dough into a ball, set in on a prepared baking sheet, and press one peanut half gently into the top of each cookie. If you have time and space, put the sheet in the freezer for 10 minutes. Brush with the egg wash and press some of the toasted sesame seeds on each. Bake about 15-20 minutes.
These are lovely with your tea, and keep beautifully in a tin for quite a while. You can make them bigger- using about a tbsp of dough each, in which case they flatten out and look more like a milk and cookies kind of cookie. I like them little with tea, though. The palm sugar is very nice, but a bit of a pain. At the asian market, it comes in sort of tablet-y shapes,in a plastic bag, and the idea is that you slice these very thinly and then chop them up. Some pieces remain a bit bigger than others, giving a nice mouth feel. It is similar in texture to maple sugar, but doesn't have such an intrusive flavor. I find that I tend to hack it into small chunks, especially if it is on the old side, and then risk the health of my food processor finishing it up.
While these are similar to the cookies we liked so much at the Imperial Tea Court in the Ferry Plaza in SF, they are lighter in flavor and less dense. I would really like to know how to make their gingered almonds. They are served in their shells, but are very easy to open with your fingers. Opening each one sets a nice pace for drinking tea and relaxing, and they are really delicious. I even went so far as to email that place in Gourmet Magazine that hassles restaurants for recipes on behalf of readers. Gourmet said they'd try, but I never heard more, so I presume it was a Closely Guarded Secret. Or maybe they were just busy that day.
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