#cookiesandkindness Recipe for November: French Snacklettes from Dorie’s Cookies

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My recipe-tester, Mary Dodd, says that these are perfect for binge-watching TV! In fact, these are a riff on a recipe that was giving to me somewhere around the turn of the century from Arnaud Lahrer, a terrific pastry chef in Paris, who called them TV Snacks.

Lahrer’s were vanilla (and I’ve got that recipe in Dorie’s Cookies too), but they were made of the same infinitely snackable almond dough. What makes these snacks is the salt – not so much that they tilt savory and not so little that you don’t want to grab one right after another.

The dough is push-button easy – I make it in a food processor – and pretty shaped into pyramids or simply pinched into bite-size pieces.

This is the first of two #cookiesandkindness recipes from Dorie’s Cookies for November. I’ve got a Thanksgiving surprise cookie for you coming up.

Simply put #cookiesandkindness is about baking cookies and sharing them. Post what you bake and share with the hashtag #cookiesandkindness and tag me @doriegreenspan and #dories_cookies so that I can find you and comment.

To learn more about #cookiesandkindness go here.

To get the best cookie tags for your treats go here.

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Remember: Bake. Share. Repeat. It’s what we bakers do – xoDorie

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French Snacklettes

From Dorie’s Cookies

Makes about 60 cookies

1 cup (100 grams) sliced, slivered or whole almonds (blanched or unblanched)

1/2 cup (100 grams) sugar

3/4 cup (102 grams) all-purpose flour

1/3 cup (28 grams) unsweetened cocoa powder

1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt or 3/4 teaspoon fleur de sel

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

7 tablespoons (31/2 ounces; 99 grams) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

1/2 cup (85 grams) mini chocolate chips or very finely chopped semisweet or bittersweet chocolate

Position the racks to divide the oven into thirds and preheat it to 325 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats.

Put the almonds and sugar in a food processor and pulse and process until the nuts are mostly ground; scrape the bowl occasionally to make sure you don’t have a thick layer on the bottom. Add the flour, cocoa, salt and cinnamon and pulse to incorporate. Scatter over the bits of cold butter and, working in long pulses, process until you have moist curds and crumbs. This might take a couple of minutes. Scrape the bowl as needed and check the dough often — it’s ready when you can pinch a piece and have it stay together. Add the chocolate and work it in with just a couple of pulses. Turn the dough out and gather it into a ball.

For each cookie, spoon out about a teaspoonful of dough and squeeze it between your hands to form a nugget. You can press the nuggets into pyramid shapes, if you’d like, but I often go for a haphazard look. Place them on the baking sheets, leaving just a little space between them; they don’t spread much. Bake for 15 minutes, rotating the sheets top to bottom and front to back after 8 minutes. The cookies will be very soft, and that’s fine — they firm as they cool. Transfer the baking sheets to racks and let the cookies rest for 5 minutes, then gently transfer them to the racks to cool completely. If you have more dough, repeat, making certain your baking sheets are cool.

Storing: The dough can be refrigerated for up to 2 days; let it rest on the counter while you preheat the oven so that it will be soft enough to shape. If you’d like, you can freeze unbaked snacklettes for up to 2 months and bake them directly from the freezer, adding a minute or two to the baking time. Kept in a covered container, the cookies will be good for about 1 week. They can be packed airtight and frozen for up to 2 months.