Olive Oil Thumbprint Cookies with Bittersweet Chocolate

Whatever happened to gold dragees, those shiny metallic beads? When I was a kid we used them around the holidays as cookie-toppers. Each one was the size of a b.b. and about as hard.

I woke up early yesterday, for some reason rustled up by the kid crawling in next to me at three in the morning (who immediately fell into his shallow dreaming), and in that fog between an uncomfortable doze and the realization that I should just get up, the dragees were dancing in my head: good idea or evil tooth-buster?

When I finally walked into the store, twelve hours later, I found that they didn't have any gold dragees.

The snow was starting to fly in loops by then and a thin, heavy layer of it swept across the road like a cotton coverlet. I had the repaired snowblower in the back of my SUV, cushioned at the bottom with my junky gym shoe (please ruin me, it said) and taped at the top so as not to poke through the fabric ceiling. At every stop it nodded deeply, like an old horse. Snowblowers are bottom-heavy.

(Aren't snowstorms ghostly?)

Despite the obstacles I stopped at another store--I should say, the only other one in this burg. They stock pretty much the same stuff as grocery store number one, but it's smaller and they fancy themselves just a bit shinier. You know, they carry more organic meat and the natural sour cream that I love, and they might just have gold dragees.

But sorry, today the world was shutting down early and someone wasn't thoughtful with the candy order. I drove the 25 miles home wondering: do they even still make them?

I'm usually not one to get fixated on the candy condiments, but I came up with this little olive oil cookie accidentally last summer, when I was in the process of trying to develop a decent olive oil pastry for a tourte des blettes, that sweet-ish swiss chard tarte from Nice, France with raisins and pine nuts. And I spent so dadblamed much money in its development (probably at least 10 dollars of olive oil) that when  I finally realized how failed crust number four could be rolled into a legion of delicious little sugared shortbread cookies, I vowed I would top these rich dubloons with a big fat gold dragee. As in golden for expensive!  But also because I remember my mother pinning down the centers of her sugar cookies with a single dragee, like an golden center button on a cushion.

These are cookies for people who are indifferent to cookies, even in the holiday season. I am one of these strange folks. I can take or leave the sweets. I show up for salt and sour . . . and honestly, I dream about the meat: the slow-cooked pork, the pancetta, the pates and all of that. And I've come to realize that, for me at least, I cannot eat both fatty meat and sweets. To maintain self-recognition, I must pick one of the two.

So you can imagine how a non-sweet cookie throws that. To bring them further into dessert territory, I poked the balls with the end of a wooden spoon and in the last few minutes of baking filled the divot with some of my homemade strawberry jam from 2009. (Thumbprint cookies are a good use for last year's jam; but always be sure to boil it first.)

Still, these cookies are less sweet than the average--but also, I think more interesting. They're not poppers but nibblers: good with tea, with coffee, with a glass of wine.

But now I'm caving to the Christmas fairy and thinking I should top these cookies, which I baked last night, with a drop of dark chocolate, the element of baking that is second-best to gold. So I took one bittersweet bar (Nestle's Chocolatier 62%, which I think is good chocolate for the money--not Valhrona, but good enough for this) and chopped it finely, and then put it through my favorite tempering process, one I learned from a pastry chef I once worked with who was into shortcuts: Melt 2/3 of the chopped chocolate in a double boiler and when it's melted and hot throw in the final 1/3 chopped chocolate. Take it off the heat, stir and let cool a bit, stirring every minute or so. When it thickens and feels room temperature, use it.

It should hold its temper--at least 75 percent of the time. And if the dot on top of your cookies blooms and snows over, do you really care? I just don't. For home cooking, this is as precise as my chocolate work gets.

Oh, and I did some googling on the dragees. They do in fact still make them, in both silver and gold metallic, but the feds have gotten ahold of them and now they are considered non-edible decorations, and completely banned in California.

Contraband! All the merrier.

Olive Oil Thumbprint Cookies with Bittersweet Chocolate

makes 50 cookies

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

6 Tablespoons unsalted butter, cold and diced

1/2 teaspoon salt

4 Tablespoons  + 1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

1 large egg yolk

4-5 Tablespoons milk

1/2 cup raspberry or strawberry jam, heated, strained and cooled

3 ounces dark bittersweet chocolate (62% percent or more)

Mix the dough as for a sable tart crust: mix together the flour, salt and 4 Tablespoons sugar and cut the butter into the flour mixture with a pastry blender, mixing until it has the texture of coarse meal. Add the olive oil and mix with a fork until combined. Whisk the egg yolk with 4 tablespoons milk. Pour in the egg mixture and mix until the dough comes together, adding the last Tablespoon of milk if necessary. The dough should be moist, but still crumbly. Turn out onto a counter and press the dough into a lump. Let sit for 30 minutes. 

To bake: Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Put the remaining 1/2 cup sugar in a small bowl. Scoop the dough by the heaping tablespoonful and roll into balls. Roll each ball in the sugar. Press onto a cookie sheet in rows, forming a little divot in the center of the cookie with your thumb or the end of a wooden spoon. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until light golden brown. In the last minute or two of baking, pull the sheet from the oven and fill the divots with jam. (I drop the jam into a quart-sized plastic bag and snip the end; it makes an ersatz pastry bag.) Bake another minute or two to set.
Cool cookies completely.
To temper chocolate: chop the chocolate finely with a heavy knife. Bring about two inches of water in a small pot to a simmer. Set a metal bowl in the pot so that it sits over the water. (Or use a double boiler. But this is how I do it.) Add 2/3 of the chopped chocolate to the bowl and let it sit. After a few minutes it will melt. Add the rest of the chopped chocolate and remove from the heat, taking care not to let any water drop into the chocolate. Stir off heat until the chocolate thickens and has cooled to room temperature. Scoop it into a pastry bag or a quart-sized ziploc bag. Snip just the very tip of the bag. Fill the jam divot up with a bit of chocolate. Cool before packing away in a tin.