Coconut Cookies With Passion-Fruit Curd (Pg 39)

Seriously. This recipe was insanely frustrating. The jury is still out on whether or not it was worth it.

First of all, I could write an entirely separate blog about my mission for the passion fruit puree this recipe calls for. I asked tons of people, nobody had ever heard of anything like it or seen anything like it, I looked everywhere....nothing. I never actually found the puree, but I found passion fruit "paste," which was more like a jam, at Fairway. Fairway is awesome, by the way, you should go if you're in the North NJ area. They roast their own coffee and they have a blend called "Fairway To Heaven." Come on, I couldn't resist.

Making this passion fruit curd was weird. All the ingredients (the jam, sugar, butter, egg yolks, some other stuff) are all cooked together and it starts getting thick but then you have to strain it through a sieve and you get all this weird clumpy junk that you have to throw away. It seemed very wasteful. And the curd itself....well, I kinda just liked the jam better on its own.

The recipe says once you make the dough for the coconut cookie, you refrigerate it and then roll it and use a round cookie cutter. OK, I know that a lot of work goes into making cookbooks and there are tons of people testing these recipes so I don't really want to criticize anyone, but I seriously think something went wrong with this and someone was slacking off in testing the recipe. There is no way this dough could've been rolled with a rolling pin. It was way too wet and sticky. I just rolled it in balls and flattened it with my palm. It worked well enough.

The cookie itself was good, but I just really love coconut so I could be biased. You really taste the coconut and the flakes are very apparent in the cookie, and I like that. As with most of the other sandwich cookies, I think this cookie could stand on its own without being a sandwich. I think the passion fruit curd was a total waste of time. I would do it again and just use the jam on its own, but the thing is that passion fruit is a very strong flavor and it overpowers the coconut. Lemon might be nice, but I think the best option would be chocolate. I think if I did it again I'd just melt a nice chocolate and I wouldn't make a sandwich, but dip half the cookie in the chocolate. Like a half moon type of thing. Coconut and chocolate can't go wrong. Can anything go wrong with chocolate? I think not.


Yield:
Recipe predicts: 3 dozen.
Actual: 14. Seriously.

32 recipes down, 143 to go.