Despite the many sweet focused posts on this blog, I don’t actually eat that many sweets. When I crave, it’s usually more along the lines of pasta and well, pasta. But recently at work I made a batch of chocolate sugar cookie dough that was a little off. It wasn’t bad, it just was a little too buttery. We baked off some of the cookies as a test batch and when everyone tried them, they thought they tasted exactly like the cookie part of an Oreo…only better.
The next day I decided to bake a few of the cookies as Oreo circles. When they were cool I piped our vanilla buttercream on half of the cookies and sandwiched them with the other half of the cookies. And voila we had Oreos…only a thousand times better. I had to break my month long no sweets at the bakery fast to try one. They were OMG good.
When I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about those cookies. Luckily, the internet abounds with homemade Oreo recipes of which the Smitten Kitchen’s are among the most well known and oft copied. I decided to hop on the very old Oreo cookie making band wagon and with my trusty kitchen helper by my side, we made Oreos.
In the Smitten Kitchen recipe, the cookies are dropped by spoonfuls onto the cookie sheets. When I made the dough I thought it was sturdy enough to roll out, so that’s what we did. We rolled the cookies to a 1/4″ thickness and then used a circle cookie to make rounds which we baked on Silpat lined cookie sheets. We baked our cookies for 11 minutes instead of 9 because I wanted a crisper cookie. They turned out perfect.
I used my own very simple buttercream recipe that I made in the food processor because I was too lazy to take the KitchenAid out again and the food processor is lighter. I put 2 cups of powdered sugar in the food processor and sliced a stick of slightly softened butter on top and gave it a whirl until it was smooth. I then scraped the seeds of a vanilla bean into the mixer and drizzled in a teensy (less than a tablespoon) bit of coconut milk and whizzed it again. It made a gorgeous filling all speckled with delicately scented vanilla beans. So pretty. I used a disposable pastry bag from AC Moore to pipe my filling but you can always use a Ziplock bag with the corner snipped off.
Besides using my own buttercream recipe, I made a few changes to the cookie recipe on the Smitten Kitchen blog. I used white wheat flour in place of all purpose flour because it’s so finely milled that you don’t notice it’s whole wheat and I often substitute it in recipes. I used the 1 cup of sugar instead of 1 and 1/2 cups and I used a scant 1 tsp. of salt because boosting the salt makes the cookies a little less sweet and more grown up tasting. For the cocoa, I used Hershey’s Special Dark which gave my cookies that signature almost black look.
I don’t praise lightly but these cookies were phenomenal. One is enough to satisfy but it’s really hard not to eat more.
