I love my teacher-cookies

One of my favorite food blogs is Smitten Kitchen. Deb is a great blogger - always posts beautiful photos and well-researched posts. (Not much like mine!) She recently posted about these intensely chocolate sablés and on the very same day that I was wanting to try something new to take to Titus pre-school teachers as a Friday treat. Perfect!

I had planned to make heart-shaped cookies, but as it turned out, I don't own a small heart-shaped cookie cutter. I have dinosaurs, I have crocodiles, even a penguin. A heart? Nope.

The original post has a long discussion on what cocoa to use  - apparently dutch-process? Well, as far as I know we only have one kind of cocoa in Sweden and I have no idea how it's made but that's what I used and it worked out fine. I also didn't sift it, because I'm insanely lazy. I ground my dark chocolate in my nifty Magimix, and then used my Kitchen-Aid to blend it all together. Simple as that!

Oh, and the teachers LOVED them. I need to do this more often, because our teachers are absolutely awesome.

Intensely chocolate sablés
115 g butter
115 g sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg yolk
125 g all-purpose flour
30 g cocoa powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
100 g dark chocolate, grated or ground in a food processor
Coarse raw sugar, to sprinkle

Cream butter, sugar and salt together. Add the vanilla extract and egg yolk, and mix. Add the dry ingredients - flour, cocoa powder and baking soda. Finally add the dark chocolate. It might look a little on the dry side but keep mixing until the dough holds together nicely.

Shape the dough into a large disc, wrap in plastic and chill for half an hour or so, to make it easier to roll out. Then do exactly that - roll out the dough, as thin as you want your cookies. Don't make them too thin - they're pretty brittle!

Cut out pretty shapes with your favorite cookie cutter - again, I have to get more basic shapes. Sprinkle with a little pinch of coarse raw sugar, and bake at 175°C for about 8 minutes.