vanilla-sugar palmiers with chocolate drizzle

Who’s up for baking a very simple cookie? You know, a cookie where you don’t even need to make the dough! Well, here it is,  the Vanilla-Sugar Palmier with Chocolate Drizzle. The recipe is based on one from Everyday Food magazine (of course it is). Their version uses cinnamon and sugar. Well, I’ve been going through quite a few vanilla beans lately. Yes, we’ve taken a second mortgage out on the house to do so. When I’m not throwing the scraped vanilla beans into my homemade vanilla extract solution, I’m putting them in a jar of sugar to make vanilla-sugar. It smells divine. So that’s what I decided to use in place of the cinnamon and sugar for these palmiers.

The recipe is as simple as unfolding the puff pastry dough on top of a sprinkling of the vanilla-sugar mixture, adding more sugar mixture on top and then rolling the dough out just a tad.  Then there’s some fancy dough folding and another dip in the sugar. A trip to the oven to bake, flip, and bake some more. Finally, a cooling off period and a drizzle of melty chocolate goodness. If you’ve got a dough-phobia, these cookies are you.  There’s really no way that you can mess these up. Well, that is, unless you forget to set the oven timer and burn them to a crisp. But I believe in you.  You can do it!

Vanilla-Sugar Palmiers with Chocolate Drizzle – adapted from Everyday Food, December 2011

• 1 cup vanilla-sugar
• 2 sheets frozen puff pastry, thawed
• 3 ounces semi-sweet chocolate, melted

Preheat oven to 375 degrees, sprinkle work surface with 1/2 cup of vanilla-sugar. Top with thawed puff pastry. Sprinkle each sheet with 3 tablespoons vanilla-sugar and gently roll dough into two 9-by-11 inch rectangles.

Working with one rectangle at a time and starting from the long end, gently fold the dough several times toward the center in 1-inch increments. Turn dough and starting from the other long end repeat the process and fold the dough towards the center to meet the other folded side. Wrap dough in plastic and freeze until very firm, but not frozen, about 20 minutes,

Cut dough crosswise into 1/2-inch-thick slices. Dip both sides in remaining vanilla-sugar. In batches, place cookies, 2 inches apart, on a parchment-lined rimmed baking sheet. Bake 12 minutes. Carefully flip each cookie with a metal spatula (I sprayed my spatula with cooking spray so that the hot sugar mixture didn’t build up on the spatula) and bake until crisp, about 6 minutes. Transfer cookies to a wire rack set in a rimmed baking a sheet and let cool completely. With a fork, drizzle cookies with chocolate and let sit until set, about 30 minutes.