The very first thing that you will notice about these cookies is the smell. Open the container or parcel that they are in and the glorious smell of coconut is almost overwhelming, in an amazingly delicious kind of way. Coconut overload. They are crunchy, with the soft bits of coconut sort of weaved though. The chocolate is just a bonus, but makes them pretty over-the-top, if you ask me.
I’m sure you’ve all gathered that I have this thing with Sea Salt, especially mixed with sweet things, so I was over the moon when I was gifted some lovely salts from Atlantic Salt Works from right here in Massachusetts (Gloucester — pronounced Glaah-stah, from those of your “from away”). The one that I was most intrigued by was the Coffee Sea Salt which sounded just perfect for these cookies. Perfect!
Here’s a quick and easy recipe that I threw together… ok, I actually threw it together twice, because I made both a raspberry version and a lemon curd version. These two shortbread bars are actually very similar — identical until the top part, actually. I wanted to show how versatile this recipe is, and that it is super super easy to make. Start to finish in under an hour, though they do take a while to cool. I made 12 oblong bars out of each (4 x 3 cut), but you could do 4 x 4 so they are almost cookie-sized.
It’s January, so who would think that lemons are the ingredient to use, but it is Meyer Lemon season, and I made some fresh lemon curd which led to making these little cookies. Who doesn’t love that whole lemon poppy seed combination! Even the cookies themselves as quite fresh and clean tasting thanks to lemon zest, lemon juice and lemon extract. A quadruple dose of vitamin c (to keep that scurvy at bay!)
Been a few weeks since I made cookies. Probably because I spent the entire month of November making cookies — for 115 hours! — so that I didn’t want to even see any for a while. But we’re back and these are a cute little surprise for January. Buttons! And peanut butter! I like peanut butter, but don’ *love* peanut butter (that is likely the German in me — not a big thing in Germany) but the peanut butter is more like frosting in this case so lighter and fluffier. Sort of like an oreo, only a million times better.