When Sarah Kieffer was kind enough to share her recipe for Chocolate Orange Sablés on her blog, I immediately added them to my to-bake list. I love the combination of orange and chocolate and think it's generally underappreciated.
The recipe is easy, but do you do need to plan ahead to allow the dough to chill for at least a couple of hours before baking. You cream room temperature butter with sugar, orange zest, and salt until light and fluffy; add an egg yolk and vanilla; mix in flour; and incorporate miniature chocolate chips and candied orange peel (I used candied peel from King Arthur Baking, which is conveniently already chopped into small pieces). I formed the dough into a log, wrapped it in parchment, and chilled it for a day. The recipe says that you are supposed to roll the log in turbinado sugar before chilling, but I thought it wasn't optimal to apply the sugar coating while the dough was freshly made and still soft. So I applied the sugar coating the next day after the log of cookie dough was nice and firm.
After adding the sugar coating, I sliced the dough into discs and baked the cookies. I liked the way the cookies were speckled with a good amount of both chocolate and orange peel, and they tasted fantastic. They had a sturdy texture that was closer to a butter cookie than a sablé; I would generally expect a sablé to be a bit sandy. But I loved the texture, as well as the bright flavor of the chewy orange peel paired with just the right amount of chocolate in a buttery base, punctuated with a nice crunch from the turbinado sugar coating. There is something holiday-ish about these cookies (Kieffer contributed the recipe to a holiday cookies issue of Bake From Scratch, and I do tend to associate candied fruits and peels with holiday baking), but I would be delighted to eat and bake these any time.
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