AJ Quigley, a regular on King Arthur’s Baking Circle community, emailed us this recipe with the following message –

“I ran across one of my favorite sugar cookie recipes years ago in one of those ‘company’ fundraiser cookbooks, and have used it quite often since then. I checked KAF’s recipes and there’s not one like it, so I thought I’d share. It makes a tender-crisp, melt-in-your-mouth cookie.”

Well, I’d been looking for the “perfect” sugar cookie recipe for a long time. Since about 1967, to be exact, the last time I tasted a sugar cookie from the Colonial Bakery in Glastonbury, Connecticut…

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So Monday is the first day of Passover. I’m sure you’ve got your seder meal all planned. Except maybe the dessert. Hmmm, what’ll it be this year? Same old, same old? How about something different, like almond cookies?

Almond cookies?! B-O-R-I-N-G…

Not if you like almond flavor – and certainly not these particular almond cookies, the likes of which you’ll never encounter in the cookie aisle at your local grocery store.

First of all, these aren’t the crumbly-textured almond cookies you’re served at the end of your American-Chinese restaurant meal, with chunks of pineapple and fortune cookies. Or fragile, lace-like Almond Crisps. Or dunkable almond biscotti.

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What is it about coconut that’s so attractive? Enshrined in popular culture from South Pacific to the Marx Brothers to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it’s a food that’s provided as much entertainment as sustenance.I’ll admit, until a few years ago, it was a food I could take or leave with equal aplomb. I think the breakthrough happened in a restaurant kitchen where I was working, and someone made coconut shrimp with mango salsa for an appetizer one evening. Holy cow, was that good! Ever since, it’s been Katy bar the door, further cemented when King Arthur started carrying our dried coconut milk powder, and I started playing. I added it to classic buttercream, and used the resulting frosting on top Kahlua-soaked chocolate cake layers for a colleague’s wedding cake.

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