Chocolate Sandwich Cookies

I spent a lot of time looking for the best chocolate pie crust and finally found it. It turns out that it makes the best chocolate sandwich cookies, one of my favorites from childhood!

Like most great recipes, these are the result of leftover dough after making who knows what. I had a brunch coming up and decided to make use of it and made some cookies.

Turns out I also had cream cheese frosting, because I always do. So, leftover pie dough and leftover frosting resulted in these sandwich cookies.

Ingredients

For the chocolate dough:

• Cocoa powder: always use unsweetened. I like Hershey's unsweetened cocoa powder, Ghirardelli Premium baking cocoa, and Scharffen Berger natural cocoa powder. And, in my experience, the dark ones are the best (this does not apply to the super dark used for making homemade oreo cookies known as dark cocoa powder).
• Butter: use good quality and unsalted. Lower quality butter usually has a larger percentage of water. For doughs, I like to use the best I can buy.
• Egg yolk: it binds the dough together and adds richness and makes it more pliable, easy to handle.
• Powdered sugar: also called confectioners' sugar or icing sugar, it acts very differently than regular sugar making the crust smoother so don't substitute it.
• Flour: I use cake or all-purpose and have great results with both. Each country tends to have its own definition of what each one should or shouldn't contain, so use the one you always do.
• Salt: I like to use kosher salt when baking. But regular table salt works just fine.
• Vanilla: I use pure vanilla extract or pure vanilla paste when available, but a good vanilla essence (artificially flavored) also works. 

For the cream cheese filling:

• Cream cheese: the regular one is still the best.
• Butter: unsalted works best, but if you like an extra kick from some salt you can use salted butter.
• Powdered sugar: this is the only choice. Don't use regular granulated sugar because the filling won't come together.
• Flavoring: I use almond extract but you can choose other flavors like ground cinnamon, coconut extract, coffee extract, chocolate, and peanut butter.

Making the chocolate dough

As mentioned before, these are sandwich cookies made with my favorite chocolate dough. The full recipe with detailed instructions is in this chocolate pie crust post.

So go ahead and make the dough, put it in the refrigerator and you're ready to roll, pun intended.

Rolling the dough

• Cold dough: it is essential so take it out of the refrigerator and let it loose some of its coldness at room temperature until it can be rolled. At first, it will seem too solid, but it will quickly start to lose temperature.
• Floured surfaces: always start with a lightly floured counter or surface. You can always add more flour later. Lightly flour the rolling pin and maybe the top of the dough. Don't overdo it until you start rolling and see how much flour the dough needs. You only want enough to not make it stick.

Vintage Kitchen tip: if the dough starts to soften too much during rolling and cutting, gather it, wrap it in plastic, and return it to the refrigerator or freezer (much faster) for several minutes until it hardens again. Try to have it cold at all times.

Cutting the cookies

Cookie cutters: you can use any cookie cutter you want. Besides the regular round cookie cutter used for sandwich cookies, I also use flowers and stars. Metal or plastic cutters both work fine.

Thickness: how thick you roll the dough depends on what you want to bake. For filled cookies such as these ones, I suggest no more than ½ inch. If you want single cookies like the image below, I say up to 1-inch is fine.

This crust is wonderful to work with because the shapes stay formed after baking.

Cream cheese filling

The frosting we all love is what I used to fill these sandwiches.

The truth is that I was trying to recreate a favorite cookie when I was growing up and decided to start with some leftover cream cheese frosting in the fridge after making the hummingbird cake.

A few drops of almond extract and boom! my smile came back as I bit into my childhood memories.

Other fillings can be chocolate ganache, peanut butter, or dulce de leche.

How to store sandwich cookies

• Airtight containers - I like to use metal tins. But any container with an airtight lid will work.
• Freezing - you can freeze the cut cookies before baking. I put the whole baking sheet in the freezer and bake it directly.

If you store already filled cookies they will soften as the days go by because the moisture from the cream cheese seeps into the dough.