A colleague kindly sent me a copy of Melissa Weller's A Good Bake as a gift, and it's a substantial tome. About half of the book (which is about 450 pages) deals with yeasted doughs. The chapter on Cookies and Bars includes only 13 recipes, but I started there first.
I decided to try Weller's recipe for "Tahini White Chocolate Chunk Cookies" -- not just because I've started baking with tahini regularly, but also because these cookies are made with brown rice flour instead of wheat flour and are gluten free. I like to have a stash of gluten-free recipes available for when I need then. While I was at Whole Foods picking up a bag of brown rice flour for the recipe, I also picked up a container of unhulled, toasted sesame seeds from the Asian food section. Weller recommends unhulled sesame seeds for this recipe, and I usually only keep hulled seeds on hand.
Making these cookies is straightforward. You beat softened butter with dark brown sugar and salt until light and fluffy; mix in tahini; add vanilla and egg; incorporate the dry ingredients (brown rice flour, baking powder, and baking soda); and mix in white chocolate (I used a 50-50 mix of Callebaut Velvet white chocolate and Callebaut Gold caramel white chocolate pistoles).
You can bake the dough immediately. I used a #20 scoop to portion out the dough and got 16 cookies from a batch. You first roll the dough in the sesame seeds and then in a granulated sugar before baking. The dough was quite soft and didn't hold its shape well as I rolled the cookies in the sesame seeds and sugar. I ended up with a bunch of wonky-shaped cookies, but they all ended up nice and round after baking.
I thought these cookies were delicious and I would not have guessed that they were gluten free from just eating one. They had a very light, delicate, crumbly texture -- like a sablé, although they were also a bit fragile and I had to be careful when handling them. While they had a long shelf life, these aren't the type of cookies that would hold up well in a mailed care package. They had a beautiful, rich, nutty sesame flavor and the white chocolate was the perfect addition. I also loved the texture from the coating of sesame seeds on the outside of the cookie. Definitely go for unhulled sesame seeds here -- they add some very nice additional sesame flavor.
I made these cookies a second time recently as part of my holiday cookie assortment, for someone who can't have wheat flour. But this really is a cookie with widespread appeal that I would make anytime, for any one.
Recipe: "Tahini White Chocolate Chunk Cookies" from A Good Bake by Melissa Weller.
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