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- Light brown sugar – adds sweetness, structure and caramel flavours.
- Caster or granulated white sugar – adds sweetness and structure.
- Pure vanilla extract paste – adds flavour and enhances the other ingredient flavours in the recipe.
– Vanilla recommendations: pure vanilla extract or vanilla paste or vanilla pods.
Plain or all-purpose flour – to build a structure
Cocoa powder – adds a rich chocolate flavour and builds structure.
Cocoa recommendations: Dr. Oetker fine dark cocoa powder or not as dark – Sevenhills wholefoods organic cacao powder
- Baking powder – increases the volume and lightens the texture during baking.
- Ground almonds – adds flavour, moisture, texture and structure to the recipe.
- Cream – creates a soft, creamy truffle-like texture when mixed with chocolate for the ganache filling.
TIP: I highly recommend adding a good pinch of fine salt to your biscuit doughs. In a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory way, salt intensifies the mouths’ ability to taste sweetness. It is the sodium that sends signals to move glucose into the sweet taste receptor cells, thus triggering the cells to register sweetness. The result is that salt not only alerts our ‘salt sensitivity’, but also triggers our ‘sweet sensitive’ taste buds.
WHAT VARIATIONS CAN I MAKE?
This recipe is very versatile and you can have fun trying different flavour twists in both the cookies and the filling!
Here are a few suggestions:
- Try adding 100g of white or dark chocolate chips to the cookie dough.
- Peanut butter or any other type of nut butter makes a great filling to sandwich these cookies together.
- Vanilla cream cheese filling: Mix together 50g icing sugar with 200g cream cheese or mascarpone and 1 tsp vanilla extract until smooth. Assemble the cookies by piping one cookie with the filling and then sandwich with another cookie.
- Coffee flavoured chocolate filling: Add 1 tsp of instant espresso powder to the milk after boiling.
