Healthy Coconut Butter Thins with Sesame Seeds

Delicate shortbread cookies are one of my favorite cookies to make. They are quick, easy, take to all sorts of favor variations, and always impress. This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is described as being similar to a shortbread cookie, but wafery and lacy. You can see that my cookies are quite classically shortbread-like. I am not sure what happened to “wafery and lacey.”

The recipe includes lime zest, shredded coconut, chopped macadamia nuts, and a pinch of coriander. Not wanting to spend $10 on macadamia nuts, I decided to use sesame seeds in their place. Granted, this change could explain the lack of a wafery, lacey texture, but it would surprise me that the substitution would make that much difference in the texture. I can’t wait to see how these came out for the other TWD bakers.
 
For a shortbread cookie these were fantastic! The addition of corn starch makes them so tender and crumbly, yet the shredded coconut adds a wonderful chewy texture. I wasn’t completely sure the sesame flavor would work, but it absolutely did. I want to try them again with orange zest, star anise, and sesame.
 
Dorie uses a great plastic bag technique for rolling the dough that makes working with this very sticky dough trouble-free. Basically, the dough is placed in a gallon-size plastic zip-top bag and rolled to fill the bag. Once chilled, cut the bag open, slice the dough and it can easily be lifted onto a baking sheet. She uses this same technique with other sticky doughs and it always works like a charm.
 
Jayne of The Barefoot Kitchen Witch picked the recipe for this week and she has it posted on her blog if you want to give it a try, but you should just spring for the whole book so you have all the other recipes too!