Dinosaur Cookies

My earliest career plan was to be a paleontologist when I grew up. That was at about age three, and I’ve changed my mind several times since, most recently upon learning that Sahadi’s was looking for a “full-time cheese person.” But my childhood interest in dinosaurs was rekindled the other week when my current interest in food led me to some stegosaurus-shaped cookie cutters. After coveting them for a few weeks, I was delighted to receive not just a stegosaurus but an entire menagerie of prehistoric creature cut-outs as an early Christmas present.

The problem with cut-out cookies is that while their shapes can be unique and exciting, their flavors usually are not. There’s nothing objectionable about sugar cookies, but they’re never memorable, and if I’m going to make dozens of anything, as one tends to when undertaking a batch of cookies, they had better have a taste that keeps you coming back for more.

Six species of dinosaurs are represented in the set I have, and I took a reasonably scientific approach to using them: as long as each species is consistent, no one can prove what they should look (or taste) like. The stegosaurus, I decided, had a chestnutty brown hide flecked with black specks. This effect was achieved with a buttery dough flavored with coffee grounds. The triceratops, meanwhile, was a golden color with granite-grey freckles (presumably for camouflaging in the mineral-rich rocks prevalent at the time), which I recreated with an orange zest and earl grey tea cookie recipe. It’s also as realistic a conjecture as any that all dinosaurs had vibrant metallic eyes, which conveniently resembled sugar dragées.

Both of the recipes I used had said to roll the dough into a log, chill it, and slice it into rounds, but I was willing to risk going the cookie cutter route. It took some experimentation to find the temperature at which the cookies could be easily cut without either sticking to the cutters or breaking apart, but the effort was worth the reward of non-bland cut-out cookies. The flavors turned out even better than expected, especially the stegosauruses – I added cocoa and black pepper to the original recipe and substituted coffee horchata for the Kahlúa that was called for, and result was an ideal balance of bitter and sweet.

After baking and cooling I had a sizeable Jurassic population. It’s on its way to extinction due to human consumption, but the remaining members look quite happy in the habitat I constructed for them out of the latest Monterey Market produce run.

Original recipes can be found here and here.