the 34 cookies of Christmas: day 20

Our twentieth cookie of Christmas 2006 is a delicate and buttery sandwich cookie. The cookies themselves are a Viennese shortbread, a lighter and more buttery cousin of traditional Scottish shortbread biscuits. These unique shortbread cookies are created using an old-fashioned cookie press and baked just to the point of a light browning of the butter in the dough. Because of this, the cookies retain a delicate crumbley texture that melts in the mouth. To sandwich the cookies together we create a traditional buttercream filling, infused with dark roasted coffee. The bitterness of the coffee is further complemented by a fine drizzle of Belgian bittersweet chocolate on the outside of the cookies. Labor intensive and fragile, these cookies are well worth the time and effort it takes to create them... they also happen to be my mother's favorite cookie that we make, and therefore, we will continue making them for a long long time!