World Chocolate Day Special

Chocolate Cherry Sandwich Cookies

Recipe

Chocolate cherry sandwich cookies are proof that one of the best things you can bake on World Chocolate Day requires no special equipment, no tempering of chocolate, and no more than thirty minutes to make a delicious chocolate dessert. All you need is a cake mix, preferably chocolate, or you’ll have to use cocoa powder, to make softer cookies that are a hallmark of whoopie pies or sandwich cookies. Into the cake mix go an egg and butter to make the cookie dough, which is shaped and baked. The filling is where it gets interesting because these chocolate cherry sandwich cookies use Maraschino cherries, which are premium syrup-soaked preserved cherries which you can source from any speciality supermarket or online stores. Along with the cherries goes their juice into the classic butter-and-powdered-sugar base that makes the buttercream. The cherry juice does double duty here: it tints the buttercream a pale pink and also makes it sweeter, with an unmistakably cherry flavour. Before trying the recipe, here are some tips, that even an easy dessert recipe, which is a World Chocolate Day special, needs patience. The cookies must be completely cooled before the frosting goes on. A warm cookie will melt the butter in the buttercream, and the frosting will slide, thin out, and lose the thick, holdable consistency that makes a good sandwich cookie worth eating. The buttercream also needs to be sufficiently thick for the cookies to stick, so make sure to adjust the consistency if too thick or runny.