While I look forward to the Culinary S.O.S. feature in the Los Angeles Times Food Section each Thursday, I really couldn't wait to try last week's recipe, a chocolate sandwich cookie from The Farm of Beverly Hills. Last Wednesday evening, I saw an item in my Facebook news feed from L.A. Times Food declaring that "These homemade oreos are one of the most delicious things to ever come out of the L.A.T. Test Kitchen, IMHO." I undoubtedly would have tried out the recipe eventually, but the Facebook endorsement pushed the recipe to the top of my baking list.
This recipe for Oreo knockoffs is fairly simple. You make a dough from butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt, and chill it before baking. I used a #60 scoop (approximately 1 tablespoon) to parcel out the dough and I was able to get enough cookies to make exactly 36 sandwiches. As directed in the recipe, I flattened the dough slightly before baking, and the resulting cookies were fairly flat, perfectly round, and all the exact same size. This is my absolute favorite kind of sandwich cookie, where all of the cookies are identical so that I don't have to spend the whole evening trying to match up oddly shaped cookies with mirror image mates.
The chocolate cookie is eerily similar to a real Oreo in both texture and flavor. Although you wouldn't know it from just looking, the cookie is crisp and dry -- and while normally I'm not a fan of dry cookies, the crisp wafer texture is what makes a real Oreo such a standout in a McFlurry or in Cookies 'n' Cream ice cream. (And to be honest, I'm not sure if the cookies are supposed to be crispy. On The Farm of Beverly Hills website, the Farmeeoh is described as "two supersized homemade soft chocolate cookies with rich cream filling.") The cookie flavor is spot-on; the Farmeeoh's toasted chocolate flavor is a dead ringer for an Oreo. The filling flavor is not quite like the original, but it's pretty close -- rich and very sweet.
Together, this cookie and the filling are really good. I would go so far as to say that they exceed the original. I would be happy to make these Faux-reos anytime (I'm stealing the name from King Arthur Flour, which has a recipe for a chocolate sandwich cookies that they have dubbed the "Faux-reo").
Recipe: "Farmeeoh cookies" from The Farm of Beverly Hills, from the November 4, 2010 Los Angeles Times.
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