Cookie of the month: Slicing a coconut cookie

This year I got the jump on holiday cookie baking in November. This wasn’t just me working early for cookie’s sake. I had a deadline in mid-November for a column I was writing on slice-and-bake cookies for Kansas Country Living, so by late October/early November, I was making cookie doughs and freezing them to get the ball rolling.

I made some of the my favorites for the column, but over the year, I had noodled around the Internet and discovered a couple of new ones to consider, just for my own testing and tasting.

Coconut anything always draws my eye, so when I saw a recipe for Slice & Bake Coconut Shortbread Cookies from Taste of Home (recipe: https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/slice-bake-coconut-shortbread-cookies/ ) The thought of buttery, sugar-y coconut cookies kept re-entering my mind. 

So, after my deadline, and just for myself, I decided to whip up these simple cookies to see if they met my expectations. They started with creaming the butter (lots of butter) and sugar (I also added a pinch of salt), then adding vanilla and then gradually adding flour. Then a generous amount of coconut (one cup) is stirred in).

Instead of shaping the dough into a log, the dough is shaped into a long-ish, well, brick. I wanted my sides to be semi-even, so I used a long bread loaf pan to form the dough.

I wouldn’t get to baking the cookies for a couple of days, so the dough was chilled for that extensive time period.

On baking day (after a tiring day of work, there’s not much else that can make you feel better than baking cookies to just bake cookies), I sliced the coconut cookie brink into 1/4-inch cookies. 

I laid the cookie slices out on a parchment-lined cookie sheet. Some I trimmed if their corners were a little oddly shaped. 

Intent on making these pre-holiday cookies a little more festive, I topped them with a little sparkling sugar and some holly-and-berry sprinkles.

The cookies spread a little in the baking process (but they had a similar appearance in the recipe), but still came out like delicate little buttery planks with the scent of vanilla, butter and coconut. They were tender, slightly crispy-edged and just faintly sweet, with that nutty coconut adding just the right amount of taste and a little bit of texture. They were the perfect shape to dip into tea or coffee. I had a feeling these would come my way again. And the slicing and baking for the season would continue…

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