Cook's Illustrated

The World’s Cutest Cookie

If I had a dollar for every time someone came up to my workstation in the test kitchen and proclaimed, “Those cookies are so cute!” I could retire. But endearing as they are, baci di dama are also fussy, and a few batches into my recipe development, I wanted to retire.

Hailing from the Piedmont region of Italy, baci di dama are sandwich cookies that consist of two tiny hazelnut buttons held together by a slim chocolate filling. (Their name translates as “lady’s kisses” because each sandwich is said to resemble a woman’s pursed lips.) Sandwich cookies are laborious to make by nature, but these are made from a short, fragile dough that must be chilled for at least an hour lest it soften too much to be workable. And because the cookies are bite-size, the portioning step is a real bear: A single batch makes dozens

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