And Who Doesn't Love a Sandwich Cookie?

The Oreo is a thing of beauty, the perfect marriage of chocolate and cream all sandwiched together in a harmonious union. I love them, but I do feel guilty eating them. The urban legends (or maybe they are not quite legends) about the cream being composed entirely of wobbly, fatty lard have even made the glutton in me stop and reflect before gorging myself on a neat stack of these processed treats.

Last week I was at the Berkeley Public Library, browsing through the cookbook section. (Yes, this public library, despite its rather paltry fiction section, does have a solid cookbook section.) I spotted the book Retro Desserts by Wayne Harley Brachman, a book filled with desserts from Grasshopper Pie to Lemon Pudding Cake to, you guessed it, Chocolate Sandwich Cookies with Vanilla-Cream Filling. Why, that sounds an awful lot like my beloved Oreos. I checked the book out, and rushed home to get my sugar-high.

The cookies where a cinch to make, crisp and crumbly, with just the right amount of vanilla cream oozing out of the sides of the cookie when a bite was taken. These sandwich cookies tasted surprisingly like those store-bought cookies, only dare I say-- better. The cookies had a pleasing brittle quality to them, they cracked not languished when you tried to bend them. But the crispness of the cookie was perfectly mediated by the luscious, though not overly sweet, cream center.

I would even say that I would use the chocolate cookie recipe again to sandwich other fillings: peanut butter, mocha buttercream, or now that the spring and summer months are upon us, ice cream. If you would like to make your obsession with chocolate sandwich cookies known, and whip up an almost guilt-free batch of your own, the recipe is on the Daily Specials page.