Sour Cherry, Oat and White Chocolate Biscuits

I’ve made treats and shared them with colleagues for as long as I’ve been working. There doesn’t always need to be an occasion, but it’s a motivating factor. For our quarterly Hack Days, I decided to make some cookies to snack on while hacking.

The original recipe is titled Cranberry, Oat and White Chocolate Biscuits, but I made the suggested substitution from the headnote. It’s from the aptly named cookbook, Sweet: Desserts from London’s Ottolenghi. There’s a lot of wholesome ingredients in here: skin-on whole almonds, whole wheat flour, old-fashioned rolled oats, and dried fruit. But let’s not kid ourselves: this is definitely a cookie, with its generous butter and sugar, along with the white chocolate icing!

Make sure you roast the almonds until they’re slightly browned and fragrant. Their nuttiness and crunch really add a lot to this cookie. The completed dough is pretty soft: I chilled the mixer bowl in the fridge for about 15 minutes before I rolled it out. I got about 18 cookies in total, as I didn’t roll the dough too thin, and used a fairly large cutter.

These cookies were good. I’m the kind of person who prefers oatmeal to chocolate chip any day, and I’m partial to the kind of cookie that combines different flavours and textures. This cookie is all that, plus, it has the bonus of an icing. The orange zest is quite noticeable, in a good way, not a flavour one usually tastes in a cookie.