These thin and delicately crispy cookies are made with pistachios for a unique nutty flavor, and finished with a thin layer of white or dark chocolate (or a mix of both) and a sprinkle of dried rose petals (fancy!)
Yield: about 40 cookies
Cook Time: 7 minutesminutes
Total Time: 1 hourhour
Ingredients
3.5ounces/ 100graw shelled pistachios or pistachio flour, about 1 cup ground
7ounces/ 200gwhite and/or dark chocolate, finely chopped
dried rose petals, for garnish
Instructions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line two heavyweight baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone mats.
Pulse pistachios in a food processor until very finely ground (but don't go so far as to make pistachio butter). You should have about 1 cup of ground pistachios.
Melt butter in a medium skillet set over medium heat. Add sugar, flour, and salt and whisk until emulsified and mixture no longer appears separated, about 3 minutes.
Whisk in cream, followed by pistachio flour and whisk until thick and smooth. Remove from heat and stir in orange zest and pistachio extract. Let cool slightly until it is thick enough to hold its shape.
Drop batter by level teaspoonfuls onto prepared baking sheets, leaving at least 3 inches of space between cookies. (I recommend baking your first pan with only 6 or 8 cookies to see how much they spread, then you can decide if you can fit more or not).
Bake for 6 to 9 minutes, rotating the baking sheets part-way through baking. The cookies are done when they are thin and bubbly and light golden brown around the edges. The more cookies there are on the same baking sheet the longer they will take to bake.
Immediately after removing from the oven, swirl a round cookie cutter slightly larger than the diameter of the cookies for a more uniformly round shape.
Let cool for 5 minutes on the cookie sheets until no longer flexible, then carefully transfer to a wire cooling rack with a thin spatula. Let baking sheet cool completely, then repeat with remaining batter. You can reuse parchment paper multiple times, just wipe of any excess grease between batches.
Melt white and/or chocolate, first setting aside about 1/5 of chocolate to use as seed chocolate. Melt remaining chocolate in a double boiler over low heat or a chocolate melting pot. When it is just melted, remove from heat and add seed chocolate, stirring until completely melted and temperature has come down to about 88-90 degrees (86 for white chocolate). This seed method will aid with tempering the chocolate and producing a snappy finish. Un-tempered chocolate is fine, it'll just need to be refrigerated to stay firm.
Using an offset spatula, spread a thin layer of melted chocolate on bottom of the cookies and place on parchment paper to set.
Transfer any leftover chocolate to a piping bag fitted with a small round tip (or use a plastic bag with the tiniest bit of the corner cut off) and drizzle decorative lines over top of the cookies. Crumble up some dried rose petals and sprinkle on top of the chocolate before it sets completely.
Store cookies in an airtight container (with parchment paper between layers) at room temperature for up to a week or in the refrigerator for up to 3 weeks.
Notes
If you don't have pistachio extract, use 1/2 teaspoon vanilla and 1/4 teaspoon almond or orange extract instead.
If you want to finish your cookies with a mix of both white and dark chocolate, you'll need about 100g of each. Melt the white chocolate first for half the batch, then you can melt the dark chocolate in the same bowl without worrying washing it (it doesn't work the other way around though).