For our annual office St. Patrick's Day party I thought I should make a broad selection of baked goods, not just boozy treats and desserts with green food coloring. I decided to make Stella Parks' Chopped Chocolate Chip Cookies (which admittedly have nothing to do with St. Patrick's Day, but I figured would be a crowd-pleaser nonetheless); Irish cream chocolate mousse (the mousse component only from this recipe); Dorie Greenspan's Green Tea Sablés; a Naughty Senator chocolate-mint marble cake; a Ginger Stout Cake from the now-closed restaurant The Marrow (blog post forthcoming); and Homemade Oreos from Bravetart.
The dough recipe for Stella's Oreos is the same one she uses for her Homemade Thin Mints -- the only difference is that the latter have peppermint extract added. I had actually made a batch of Oreos before St. Patrick's Day and burned most of the cookies (just as I did with the Thin Mints). The thing about these cookies is that they are prone to burning because they are small and thin. It doesn't help that color of the dough is really dark, making it impossible to judge the cookies' doneness by their appearance. And if your cookies aren't exactly uniform in thickness, they're going to bake at different rates. So this time around I used 1/8-inch guides to ensure that all of my cookies were rolled to the same thickness and I pulled them from the oven after 13 minutes, which is a bit short of the recommended baking time.
Stella recommends using an embossed rolling pin to create a pattern on the cookies. I looked into this and decided an embossed pin was too spendy. Instead, I picked up a whimsical fondant embosser with a quilted pattern of tiny mustaches (from the same online shop where I bought my peanut cutter and embosser). The impression in a baked cookie is nowhere near as sharp as it would be in fondant, but the design is still recognizable, and I though the scale of the pattern was perfect for the size of the Oreos. I made them 1.75-inches in diameter, getting 64 cookies from a batch.
Stella's Oreo filling uses clarified butter, which she says helps creates a sturdy filling that won't squish out or cause the cookies the soften over time. To prepare the butter, you just simmer it until all the water has been cooked off (this process is noisy, so you know the butter is ready after it becomes silent) and then strain it. You transfer the butter to a mixing bowl and beat it with vanilla, salt, and powdered sugar. Because this filling sets firm, you have to use it immediately to fill the cookies, using a pastry bag. I dyed the filling a light shade of green to fit in with the St. Patrick's Day theme.
As Stella promised, this filling is firm and does not squish out at all when you bite into a cookie. In fact, the filling acts exactly like real Oreo filling -- you can actually twist one of these homemade Oreos apart and end up with all of the filling perfectly intact on one half of the sandwich, with the other half coming away essentially clean. It occurred to me that perhaps making a peanut butter version of this filling with clarified butter would solve the squishy filling problem I had with Stella's homemade Nutter Butters.
The chocolate cookie portion of these Oreos is a dead ringer for the real thing. The cookies have the same dry, crunchy texture, and the deep chocolate toasted flavor of a real Oreo. The texture of the filling is also identical. I think this very close knockoff could likely pass for a real Oreo if you ate one with your eyes closed. Even though I thought they were a very close imitation, many of my tasters insisted that the homemade version was better than a real Oreo. One colleague told me he took a cookie home to his wife, who called it "life changing." I wouldn't go that far, but I will say that Stella got this recipe spot on. I definitely prefer it over Joanne Chang's homemade Oreo recipe. And while I still love the Farmeeoh Faux-reo -- especially for its ease, since it's a drop cookie -- it does not emulate a real Oreo nearly as well as Stella's recipe.
Recipe: "Homemade Oreos" from Bravetart by Stella Parks, recipe available here at Serious Eats.
Previous Posts:
The dough recipe for Stella's Oreos is the same one she uses for her Homemade Thin Mints -- the only difference is that the latter have peppermint extract added. I had actually made a batch of Oreos before St. Patrick's Day and burned most of the cookies (just as I did with the Thin Mints). The thing about these cookies is that they are prone to burning because they are small and thin. It doesn't help that color of the dough is really dark, making it impossible to judge the cookies' doneness by their appearance. And if your cookies aren't exactly uniform in thickness, they're going to bake at different rates. So this time around I used 1/8-inch guides to ensure that all of my cookies were rolled to the same thickness and I pulled them from the oven after 13 minutes, which is a bit short of the recommended baking time.
Stella recommends using an embossed rolling pin to create a pattern on the cookies. I looked into this and decided an embossed pin was too spendy. Instead, I picked up a whimsical fondant embosser with a quilted pattern of tiny mustaches (from the same online shop where I bought my peanut cutter and embosser). The impression in a baked cookie is nowhere near as sharp as it would be in fondant, but the design is still recognizable, and I though the scale of the pattern was perfect for the size of the Oreos. I made them 1.75-inches in diameter, getting 64 cookies from a batch.
As Stella promised, this filling is firm and does not squish out at all when you bite into a cookie. In fact, the filling acts exactly like real Oreo filling -- you can actually twist one of these homemade Oreos apart and end up with all of the filling perfectly intact on one half of the sandwich, with the other half coming away essentially clean. It occurred to me that perhaps making a peanut butter version of this filling with clarified butter would solve the squishy filling problem I had with Stella's homemade Nutter Butters.
The chocolate cookie portion of these Oreos is a dead ringer for the real thing. The cookies have the same dry, crunchy texture, and the deep chocolate toasted flavor of a real Oreo. The texture of the filling is also identical. I think this very close knockoff could likely pass for a real Oreo if you ate one with your eyes closed. Even though I thought they were a very close imitation, many of my tasters insisted that the homemade version was better than a real Oreo. One colleague told me he took a cookie home to his wife, who called it "life changing." I wouldn't go that far, but I will say that Stella got this recipe spot on. I definitely prefer it over Joanne Chang's homemade Oreo recipe. And while I still love the Farmeeoh Faux-reo -- especially for its ease, since it's a drop cookie -- it does not emulate a real Oreo nearly as well as Stella's recipe.
Recipe: "Homemade Oreos" from Bravetart by Stella Parks, recipe available here at Serious Eats.
Previous Posts:
- "Doing It the Hard Way: Homemade Oreos," November 8, 2013.
- "The Faux-reo: Farmeeoh Cookies," November 9, 2010.
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