Perfectly Peerless Coconut Crisp Cookies

I love to try out a new cookie recipe, and I found this one in The Good Cookie cookbook by Tish Boyle. Although I made a few alterations on the recipe, when I first came across it I was struck by how delicious the combination on ingredients sounded, and how I could not entirely picture what the cookie would look like or taste – in my mind – the flavor it would have. Happily, after an adventurous go at the recipe, with few expectations in place, I found that it is indeed a good cookie. Once I sampled these, though, I found it difficult to come up with an apt comparison so as to accurately describe its taste; on the one hand, there is the delightful combination of chocolate and coconut, which leads me to think of coconut cream chocolates, or Samoa girl scout cookies, minus the caramel. But the texture is almost that of shortbread: dense and a bit sandy, and with a noticeable hint of butter flavor. So, there really is nothing that I can completely compare these cookies to, which is a bit frustrating in terms of exposition, but absolutely wonderful in terms of cookie creation.

Because they are a heartier cookie, I envision them as the perfect companion to a holiday dessert buffet, and because they are quite different from the garden variety drop cookie, as a unique gift for the dessert lover who has tasted it all. I intend on making several batches to bring to a few of the upcoming Christmas dinners and parties, and hopefully I will come back with some appropriate adjectives to describe this coconut cookie.

Coconut Crisp Cookies

Yield: About 4 dozen

Ingredients:
1 ¾ cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. salt
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, room temperature
2/3 cup date sugar
1/3 cup light brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 cups unsweetened flaked coconut
2 oz. semisweet chocolate, chopped

Directions:
1. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.
2. In a large bowl, blend together the butter and sugars until light. Beat in the egg, then the vanilla extract. Gently mix in the coconut and the chocolate. Add in the flour mixture until well-blended. Divide the dough into two pieces and shape each half into a disk. Wrap each disk in plastic wrap and refrigerate 1 hour.
3. After 1 hour, shape each disk into a 12-inch log, re-wrap, and refrigerate for at least two hours.
4. Preheat the oven to 325° F and line two cookie sheets with parchment paper.
5. Unwrap one log of dough. Using a large knife, cut the dough into ½-inch thick slices and place on the baking sheets. Repeat with the other log.
6. Bake for 15-17 minutes, rotating the cookie sheet halfway through cooking time. Remove when the bottoms are lightly browned but the tops are still soft. Cool on wire racks.