Cappuccino-Chocolate Bites

Le sigh . . . I heart my morning cup of coffee. Right now I have two jobs, and one requires that I wake up at the ungodly hour of 4 o'clock in the morning (otherwise known as "the middle of the night"). I know I could pop out of bed and have a glass of orange juice, but it wouldn't be the same as my beloved coffee. The coffee habit is a relatively new thing for me. I only started drinking coffee every morning about two years ago; before then, I reserved cofffee for special occasions:  early morning meetings, festive holiday coffees, and traveling. And while I am strictly a drip coffee with milk and sugar girl these days, I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for cappuccino because that's the drink that started me down the coffee road. 

My parents had a cappuccino maker in the early 80's and used to bust it out with a certain amount of regularity. They had the little espresso cups and the cappuccino cups and they'd steam the milk and drink cappiccino with family and friends. Of course, cappuccino is so pretty, and I'd always ask to have a little sip. Once I got through the milk to the coffee I lost all interest in the coffee. Then we went to Italy and I drank cappuccino with breakfast every morning . . . and gauchly ordered it after dinner in the evening (be still my teenage American heart). I never wanted to be "addicted" to coffee though, so I always reserved it for gala occasions. Well, we all know that stopped the second my feet hit the bricks in Georgetown.

If you happened to miss the flurry of memos going around email inboxes, the blogosphere, holiday baking magazines and cooking shows, it's time to bake cookies. And, gosh darn it, if you're not baking cookies right now, get to a doctor straight away because there is most definitely something wrong with you. The contrary part of my nature bucks the deluge of sources and resources dictating that I must bake now or sacrafice my holiday season to the pain and suffering of life without cookies. I do love to bake though, and of course cookies are so festive, so I always cave in (truth told, I don't even need to be convinced). I was flipping around Martha Stewart's Cookies (a really fantastic book) looking for something a little bit different, and I paused on the Cappuccino-Chocolate Bites. Maybe they aren't different for everyone, but they're certainly different from the normal holiday cookies I grew up with.

I grew up with (and still bake) very traditional flavors for Christmas cookies. Chances are the cookies will either be spicy (gingersnaps) or buttery (jam thumbprints) or citrus-y (orange spritz). Chocolate rarely enters the mix (tragic) and coffee never enters the mix (more tragic still). In addition to the unusal flavors, these cookies require chilling, rolling, chilling, cutting, baking, and sandwiching:  that is quite a bit of work when you're already baking several other types of cookies. That said, I wanted to try them, and I think they're worth it. There are quite a few steps, but they're easily split up and you can (and in my opinion, should) spread out the process over a few days. The dough comes together easily enough, but it's a very soft dough, and I have a couple of notes about rolling the dough and retaining your sanity:

1. The recipe calls to roll the dough out between parchment paper to about 1/8" thick. This is pretty thin. Thin, sticky dough is NOT easy to cut out; however, if you roll out the dough and pop it into the freezer on a sheet pan for about 10-15 minutes and then cut out your circles, it's a seriously simple process.

2. The prettiest part of the dough -- in my opinion -- is the lovely speckled appearance the gound espresso beans (or instant espresso powder that I substituted) give the dough. When you gather your scraps and re-roll, though, this speckled appearance begins to mottle and then fade into one sort of cohesive color. No worries on that score, however, because the cookies are dusted with powdered sugar and cocoa powder at the end anyway. You can see that the spots are still present in the second roll, though not as noticeable. If you're neurotic about using every last scrap of your dough (like I am) then you'll more than likely end up with a cookie that looks like my third roll round. Perhaps the ground espresso beans, rather than the instant espresso powder that I used, would be more likely to retain their integrity in the dough. Darn that espresso powder -- it lacks integrity.

All told, I loved these cookies. They're delicate, buttery, and have a lovely, lovely cappuccino flavor. Dudley loved them, too, and I think that they'll make a repeat appearance in the future. I think they'd actually be lovely at the end of a meal, perhaps with a cup of espresso? They'd be quite lovely with a cup of hot chocolate as well. 

Cappuccino-Chocolate Bites

Martha Stewart's Cookies

Ingredients

2/3 cup all-purpose flour

1/8 teaspoon coarse salt

1 tablespoon finely ground espresso beans (I substituted instant espresso powder because that's what I had handy)

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature

1/4 cup confectioners' sugar, plus more for dusting

1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1/3 cup heavy cream

2 1/2 ounces milk chocolate, finely chopped

Unsweetened cocoa powder, for dusting

Whisk flour, espresso, and salt in a bowl. Put butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle, and mix on medium-high speed until pale and fluffy. Mix in vanilla. Add flour mixture; mix on medium-low until dough comes together. Shape into a disk, and wrap in plastic. Refrigerate 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Let dough stand at room temperature 10 minutes. Roll between sheets of parchment to 1/8 inch thick. Cut out rounds with a 1 1/8-inch cutter; space 1/2 inch apart on baking sheets lined with parchment. Reroll scraps; cut out. Freeze 10 minutes.

Bake until set but not browned, about 9 minutes. Let cool on sheets 5 minutes. Transfer to wire racks; cool completely.

Bring cream to a simmer. Pour over chocolate; stir until smooth. Press plastic wrap onto surface; refrigerate at least 4 hours or up to overnight. Whisk to soft peaks; transfer to a pastry bag fitted with a 1/4-inch plain round tip. Pipe about 1 teaspoon filling on bottoms of half the cookies; sandwich with remaining cookies. Dust with cocoa and confectioners' sugar. Cookies can be refrigerated in an airtight container up to 1 day.