This is another recipe I made while visiting my parents a few weeks ago. It sounded like a great summer cookie – a citrus-y cream filling sandwiched between two soft butter cookies studded with grapefruit zest.
The cookie dough is made with both grapefruit juice and the zest from a ruby red grapefruit (mixed with sugar).
My cookie dough ended up very, very soft – I think my butter was far too soft when I made the dough. “Room temperature” is such a vague instruction and room temperature in August probably not what the MSBH had in mind.
The dough is wrapped and chilled prior to rolling out.
I had to use a lot of flour while rolling my dough out – it was just too soft, even after being in the refrigerator for several hours.
You are supposed to cut the cookies with a small round cookie cutter. The smallest cookie cutter I could find in my mom’s kitchen was a heart-shaped one, about twice the size the MSBH recommended. My dough was too soft to cooperate with any cookie cutter, really, and so I ended up forming little balls of d0ugh and then patting them into rough circles. Also shown are the few heart shapes I managed to get on the baking sheet.
You can see none of the cookies retained a good shape while baking, but they worked well enough for the sandwiches.
The cookies themselves are soft and a little chewy, and absolutely have a citrus-infused ZING! to them. Very tasty all my themselves.
The cream filling is made with butter, powdered sugar, grapefruit juice, and honey all mixed together until fluffy and smooth. The mixture curdled a bit after adding the grapefruit juice, but it worked its way back to smooth after a few minutes in the mixer.
The filling is sickeningly sweet, but that didn’t stop me from loading up each individual cookie.
I could literally only eat one small bite before being overcome by the sheer sugar load of these cookies. I swear I could feel my teeth rotting out as I chewed. But other people didn’t seem so put-off by sweetness so I suppose it’s a subjective thing. I loved the cookie part just by itself and think the cream filling is just overkill.
