Kosher for Passover Chocolate Chip Cookies and Chocolate Chunk Coconut Macaroons

It's Passover time! Which means lots of dietary restrictions. If you are interested in what the actual rules are, click here for information about general laws regarding eating kosher, and here for specific restrictions for Passover. Basically, because the Jews had to flee Egypt quickly, they had no time for their bread to rise and had to eat matzah, an unleavened bread similar to a cracker. So, when making baked goods, matzah meal has to be substituted for flour to keep the items kosher for Passover.

Martha has one specifically marked "Kosher for Passover" recipe in her cookies cookbook, Kosher for Passover Chocolate Chip Cookies.

These cookies call for matzah meal as well as matzah farfel instead of flour. Because kashrut requires that dairy and meat not be eaten together at the same meal, and meat is typically served at most seders, this recipe is also dairy-free, using vegetable oil instead of butter and dairy-free chocolate chips. Matzah meal is by no means a perfect substitute for flour, and kosher for passover desserts have a deservedly bad reputation. Unfortunately, although these cookies are edible and not horrendous, they certainly not amazing either. They are crisp and crunchy, and the walnuts give them a nice flavor ... but I will definitely not be making these during the rest of the year.

The cookie most people associate with Passover are macaroons, typically the ones prepared by Manischewitz. Martha has a coconut macaroon recipe in her cookbook, so I decided to try it out, since nothing in the recipe is trafe for passover.
The recipe I chose has several variations, for simple plain coconut macaroons, chocolate chunk or chocolate macaroons. They were incredibly simple to make with very few ingredients, just coconut, a little sugar, egg whites, vanilla and a dash of salt. On the website, it appears that this recipe has been removed, and replaced by this one, which also calls for condensed milk. In any case, these were very simple and very good, kind of like a Mounds Bar.

Banana-Walnut Chocolate-Chunk Cookies

The Cigarettes Russes were very popular and almost gone, so I made another batch of cookies tonight. We are buried under a ton of snow here in Columbus, OH, so I wasn't able to run out to get any special ingredients and I just wanted to make some comfort food. The recipe I chose was Banana-Walnut Chocolate-Chunk Cookies (page 170), from the "crunchy & nutty" section of Martha's cookbook.

These cookies were extremely easy to make. Since I didn't have whole wheat flour, I simply used all-purpose flour for all the required flour. I substituted semi-sweet chocolate chips instead of chopping up chocolate into chunks (so this should probably be called Banana Walnut Chocolate Chip cookies in this case). As Martha says in her little intro to this recipe, these cookies combine "two bakery classics" - they are a delicious blend of banana bread and chocolate chip cookies. Yum!

My husband has been complaining that I like my cookies too crispy, so the texture of these were perfect for him, a little cakey and nice and soft.

Everyone enjoyed them - these are my kids and my brother-in-law noshing on the cookies after dinner.

Cigarettes Russes

I decided to get a little fancy in my cookie-making today. I tried out Martha's recipe for Cigarettes Russes (page 30). These are the wafer-like tube-shaped cookies that are often paired with ice cream and either filled with or dipped in chocolate.

The batter was fairly easy to make. It called for powdered sugar, flour and salt to be sifted together. Then, in a well in the center (pictured), combine melted butter, egg whites, cream and vanilla. Although the recipe didn't mention an electric mixer, I used the whisk attachment on my KitchenAid and it was a fairly painless process. The batter was pretty runny, but in accordance with the directions, it was refrigerated for several hours (in this case, it was in the fridge for about 8 hours).

I almost forgot about the cookies though, until my husband saw the dough in the downstairs refrigerator and reminded me. The most labor-intensive process is baking and forming the cookies, but it wasn't difficult and I found it fun. You have to spread the batter onto the cookie sheets VERY THINLY (I don't think I ever got it thin enough). In fact, I think the batter should almost be translucent when you have spread it out. My cookies were more like cigars rather than cigarettes because the batter wasn't spread thin enough.

I only fit about 3 cookies on each cookie sheet because of how large the cookies get when you spread out the batter. They cook for a very short period of time - 6 minutes.

As soon as the cookies are removed from the oven, you quickly remove them with your handy offset spatula and wrap them around a dowel (or in my case, a chopstick). I realized by the end of this process, however, that I could have just rolled them up. After you let them cook, dip them in melted chocolate and/or nuts. This recipe calls for bittersweet chocolate; I thought that would be too harsh, so I used half bittersweet and half semi-sweet, but my husband and I both thought it was still quite bitter.

The cookies are "light and delicious" - as per the section of the cookbook into which they fall. They are a little spongy, quite sweet, and crunchy on the edges. Delightful!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

Tonight I made Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies (page 228) for dessert after our Shabbat dinner. This is a fairly simple recipe, but the cookie is loaded with goodies. I made a couple of substitutions - I do not have whole wheat flour in our pantry, so I used all-purpose flour and I hate natural peanut butter, so I just used regular old Jif (yum).

My daughters helped me measure out and pour the ingredients and we used our medium sized Oxo cookie scoop to ladle out the dough. The optimum baking time for our oven was 14 minutes and the cookies needed about two minutes to cool on the baking sheet before transferring them to the wire rack.

My mom's boyfriend suggested that the peanut butter flavor was a little understated, but I thought the cookies were delish!

Double Chocolate Coconut Cookies

Tonight I looked up "white chocolate chips" in the index of Martha Stewart's Cookies and found this recipe: Double Chocolate Coconut Cookies (page 173). From the "chunky & nutty" section, these cookies are a perfect storm of all of my favorite things: chocolate, coconut and almonds. Yum! (Actually, the recipe called for walnuts, but in my humble opinion, almonds are a better combination with chocolate and coconut.)

These cookies are TROUBLE ... they are soooooo delicious that I will not be able to keep my hands off of them!!!

I used two tablespoons to drop them onto the baking sheet instead of the ice cream scoop as recommended by Martha, and as a result, my cookies are a little larger than hers and therefore yielded a lower number of cookies (I got about four dozen rather than the five dozen suggested in the recipe).

Soft and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

So, this is my third batch of cookies for the boys' poker weekend. The other batch of cookies (about which we will not blog) was a disaster, due to a horrendous error on my part. Let's just say it's a good thing I'm not a surgeon, because I'd probably be the one who accidentally amputated the wrong limb. My bad.

Anyway, so the fallback is the "undisputed champ of the cookie world" (so says Martha): the chocolate chip cookie (page 58). Not such a bad alternate, but not what I wanted to send with him either.

It was a cinch to pull together - all your typical cookie ingredients. The only deviation I made was to substitute mini chocolate chips for regular ones, since I didn't have any regular-sized chocolate chips in the pantry. The result is a more chocolatey cookie. Very tasty.

Magic Blondies

The first recipe that I attempted from Martha Stewart's Cookies was the Magic Blondies recipe from page 180. I am not going in any particular order in the cookbook; I chose this recipe because I was looking for something that contained coconut to use up the large amount of shredded coconut that I found in our pantry (no idea why we have THREE bags of shredded coconut in there anyway).

The recipe chapters in this book are divided by texture. This recipe was deservedly located within the "chunky and nutty" section of the book, as they call for chocolate chips, coconut, walnuts and dried cranberries (or cherries). Because my husband has an almost pathological aversion to dried fruit, I omitted the cranberries/cherries.


The cookie batter itself is fairly basic - flour, baking powder, salt, brown sugar (no white sugar), butter, eggs and vanilla. No special techniques or tools are needed.

You add the coconut/nut/chocolate chip mixture to the top of each cookie. These are meant to be baked in muffin tins, I like a mini portion better, so I used my mini muffin pan with excellent results (same baking time).


They were absolutely delicious! The consistency is somewhere between a cookie and a brownie, with a nice crunch from the coconut and nuts and a little gooey-ness from the chocolate chips. The mini portion is perfect for a two-bite snack. The topping is a little crumbly and probably would not withstand a lot of jostling if you wanted to take them somewhere else, but I was able to pack away a few for my mom without any major damage.