Recipe Details
Ingredients (yields Serves 16 servings)
- 2 sticks unsalted butter, cut into pieces and at room temperature
- 2/3 cups granulated sugar
- 1/2 cups packed light brown sugar
- 3 tablespoons whole milk
- 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 3/4 cups unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1/2 teaspoons salt
- 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
- 1/2 cups mini semisweet chocolate chips (optional)
- 1 1/2 cups chopped roasted unsalted pistachios
- 1 1/2 cups (12 ounces) mascarpone cheese
- 3/4 cups ricotta cheese
- 1 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar
- 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 3/4 teaspoons salt
Cooking Instructions
For cooking instructions, please visit foodnetwork.com
Public Comments (1)
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Robin_Horrigan
March 27th, 2010
I would love to give this recipe five stars because I think it is simply the most heavenly flavor combination I have ever tasted - and such a creative and fresh idea to begin with. However, the recipe needs a little work. Twelve posters on Food Network's web site made comments about the cookies being too soft, spreading too much when baking and being too thin and difficult to work with. Posters also complained that the filling is not stiff enough to yield a finished product like in the photograph where the pistachios decorate the outside of the cookie so nicely.
Taking these universal complaints into consideration, I made some adjustments before trying them, which I rarely do when I bake. First, I did not shape the dough into a log and then slice it later. I left it in the bowl of my stand mixer, covered it well, and chilled it overnight. Then I used my one ounce ice cream scoop to portion the dough into balls onto the prepared cookie sheets. This did seem to solve the shape problem - the cookies came out looking perfect and they did not have the spreading problems that others described.
I also increased the amount of confectioner's sugar from 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 cups to make it stiffer and I chilled it for an hour before trying to assemble the cookies. That said, the filling still seemed too loose to me and the cookies were very soft. The first one I tried to assemble fell apart in my hands (and oh, too bad, I had to eat it). It was positively heavenly.
So in the end what I did was chill the cookies themselves to try to dry them out a bit before I ultimately made the sandwiches. That seemed to do the trick.
Lastly, just a suggestion, but I think orange flavor would add another layer of deliciousness to these confections - if you like the chocolate-orange combination, try beating the zest of one orange into the filling.
I did get exactly sixteen finished cookies out of this (after the disastrous one I had to sacrifice to the tasting gods).