White Chocolate Filled Holiday Cookies

My older daughter has been on a gluten free diet since she was 2 and grain free most of that time. My younger daughter has been grain free her entire life. While they think certain treat foods look tasty they have no experience with them and so they don’t really long for old favorites for me to emulate. That is a nice relief in many ways since it means I don’t have to try to emulate something impossible with our limited diet. It also means that my recipes don’t have those inspired names from other cultures and times long past like Snickerdoodles or Grasshoppers.

This year my older daughter was inspired to make our cut out cookies and layer them with some sort of filling. We talked several options over and settled on white chocolate for the filling. I suspect that you could replace the cocoa butter with unsweetened chocolate in this recipe and get a very similar (but dark chocolate) filling. Since regular chocolate is high oxalate we have to make do with white chocolate here.

White Chocolate Filled Holiday Cookies

• Double recipe of my GAPS Low Oxalate Cut Out Cookies
• Dried Fruit like raisins, sultanas, and fruit leather (optional)
• 3 oz Cacao Butter (food grade only)
• 1/8 cup honey
• 1/4 tsp Ground Vanilla Beans (make sure it has no additives)
• 1/4 cup butter

Make the cookies. Be sure to cut out two of each shape that you want. You may cut a hole in the middle to let some of the filling show through. These might look really good if you tinted the cookies red or green. I like these natural food coloring tints from India Tree. India Tree Natural Decorating Colours. You can also decorate the cookies with dried fruit if you want to. Simply press the fruit into the top of the unbaked cookies before baking them. Be sure to only decorate “top” cookies. Try to roll the cookies nice and thin for this or they will get quite thick when layered with filling. Be careful to not go too thin since these cookies are a bit more delicate than wheat flour cookies especially before you bake them.

Allow the cookies to cool till room temperature on a cooling rack.

Meanwhile set up a double boiler. I prefer to use a glass bowl over a pot of water on medium heat. In the bowl carefully melt the cacao butter, honey, butter and ground vanilla bean. Be careful to not get any moisture into the melting mixture or it can become grainy and won’t ever be smooth. Allow everything to melt and stir it together. Move the bowl to the fridge and set a timer for 10 min.

After 10 min get it out and mix it together with a Hand Blender or mixer. It will begin to turn white when you mix it. If it is still liquid return it to the fridge for another 10 min. Repeat mixing it every 10 min until it begins to turn thick and creamy. Once it begins to turn thick it will get much thicker quickly so be ready to go once it gets to that point. You don’t have to use the fridge, just wait 20 min between mixing times if you just let it cool on the counter.

Once it begins to get thick move quickly to get it spread on the cookies before it gets really firm. You can still spread it when it is even firmer but it isn’t as easy. My kids especially struggled with spreading it. If you want you can set the bowl into a bowl of warm water to soften it up if it gets too firm before you finish.

This recipe made just enough for the cookies we wanted to make into sandwiches. That was about 3/4 of the double recipe of cookies. However I let my 8 year old roll out some of the cookies and some came out quite thick. If you want to make all nice thin cookies and all of them filled this is probably perfect for generously filling a single recipe of cookies.