Description
Espresso dark chocolate sablé cookies are delicious little buttery French cookies that are packed with coffee and chocolate flavors. They're a great Christmas cookie recipe but they're also great year-round with a hot cup of coffee or espresso!
Ingredients
Units
Scale
- 1 1/2 tbsp instant espresso powder
- 1 tbsp boiling water
- 8 oz (2 sticks; 226 g) unsalted butter, at room temperature and cut into cubes
- 2/3 cup (80 g) confectioners' sugar
- 1/2 tsp fine sea salt
- Pinch ground cinnamon
- 3/4 tsp pure vanilla extract
- 2 cups (272 g) all-purpose flour
- 4 oz (113 g) bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
Instructions
- Pour the boiling water over the espresso powder and stir to dissolve to make a coffee extract; set aside to cool.
- In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter, sugar, salt, and cinnamon at medium speed for 3 minutes. Scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl and mix in the vanilla and coffee extract at low speed until combined. With the mixer off, add the flour and mix on low until just barely incorporated. On low speed, stir the chocolate into the batter. Scrape the sides of the bowl and give the batter a few good stirs.
- Divide the dough in half, shape them into discs, and place one of the discs between two pieces of parchment paper. Roll the dough out to a ¼-inch thickness; repeat with the second disc and two more pieces of parchment. Refrigerate the dough in the parchment (you can stack them) for at least 2 hours or freeze for at least 1 hour.
- When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 325° F and ready a 12-well muffin tin. Working with one piece of dough and a 2-inch cookie cutter, cut out rounds and drop each into a well of the muffin tin. (See Note below for Freezing instructions.)
- When the muffin tins are full, bake for 18 to 20 minutes, rotating the pans from front to back halfway through the time. In the meantime, gather up the scraps, re-roll, chill, cut, and bake. Repeat with the second piece of dough. Cool the cookies in the tins on a wire rack for 10 minutes then slip the cookies out of the tin (a small offset spatula or butter knife works well here) and cool the cookies completely on the rack. Store in a tightly sealed container at room temperature for up to 3 days.
Notes
If you’re not ready to bake all of the cookies at once, cut all of the dough into discs, freeze the discs on a parchment-lined baking sheet, toss the discs into a zip-top freezer bag, and freeze until ready to bake. At that time, you’ll just need to preheat the oven, pop the discs into the muffin tins, and bake!
barely adapted from Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan
These cookies look and sound absolutely incredible! I made sables YEARS ago (and I think from a Dorie recipe, nonetheless), but the muffin pan trick is genius. Adding these to my to-bake list!
Thank you, Valentina! I know – the first time I made sables was years and years ago too and they’ve just stuck with me. I’m a huge shortbread lover and they’re pretty similar in texture and flavor so it’s not a surprise how much I love this version. I just posted Dorie’s French vanilla sables earlier this week so you may want to add them to your list too. 🙂
Hello
I wonder if you think it would work just rolling the dough into a log and simply cut or sliceit into discs? The log would have to fit the muffin tin, of course.
That would totally work!