Christmas Cookies, Day 3: Hazelnut Espresso Truffle Cookies and Molasses Spice Cookies, Take 2

Total time: A long time

Source: The Perfect Cookie

Servings: 30 sandwich cookies, a bunch of little trees, and 24 molasses cookies

Okay, I probably just feel like the espresso cookies took a long time because I don’t like coffee so I wasn’t stoked about them. They took several stages so they were spread out throughout the day, which also made it feel like a very long time. But I’ve heard nothing but good things about them, and I even ate several of the little trees. For something that tastes like coffee, they were pretty good. Usually coffee-flavored things are repulsive to me.

In general, I wouldn’t say that any of the steps were exceptionally difficult. Sean took the lead again, but I inevitably hovered and took over a few steps. The hardest part was probably dealing with the ganache filling because it firmed up much faster than it was supposed to so it was difficult to spread on the (decently soft) cookies. Refrigerating it for less time and stirring it more frequently might have solved that.

We made the trees out of the dough that had been rolled too many times because I understand the reasoning behind not rolling the dough too many times but I just can’t bring myself to throw away that much dough. We were grateful for the trees because the cookies are super rich, so the trees are a way to get a little taste without it being your entire dessert. Also, we had way too much chocolate for drizzling. Maybe melt less than the recipe calls for and then melt more if you’re unsatisfied with the amount of chocolate you have.

And yes, as previously mentioned, Sean went back and remade the molasses spice cookies. They were much better, so I think his previous hypothesis was correct. We ended up leaving the other ones unglazed and just glazing these ones. The other ones were still a little gooey on the inside because they didn’t spread out, but these ones were perfect.