Toasted Coconut & Orange Icebox Cookies for Cookie Carnival

I’ve joined another baking group.  Cookie Carnival is a monthly cookie baking group.  A random cookie recipe is chosen and everyone in the group posts their makings of the cookie.  Once a month.  I can handle that.  I know, we just moved.  I’m tired.  We’re totally out of the house—It LOOKS fabulous.  Better than the day we moved in five years ago.  It was not fun.  Now we are living in a small duplex until we move to Utah in June.  THAT will be fun, camping out in these quarters. ;)

Let’s get on with this month’s cookie.  I made these cookies a good two weeks ago.  The cookies that were chosen are Toasted Coconut & Orange Icebox Cookies from Aida Mollencamp on Food Network.  You can get the recipe on the link.  The cookies are great, but the written recipe is not the greatest.  If you’d like an easier recipe to follow, check out Amanda’s post for these cookies on Amanda's Cookin'.  She wrote the recipe in better to understand terms.  Amanda and I had talked (emailed) a few weeks ago about the cookies and if you check out hers, we had no idea our cookies were photographed so similarly until I saw her post for the cookies.  Great minds, she and I. ;)

We also both veered from the recipe and added the orange zest by rubbing it in with the sugar.  I halved the recipe, so there was actually a lot of zest added to 1/4 cup sugar.  It was sure fragrant!  The full recipes uses 2 packed tablespoons of zest, so after zesting a medium size orange, I had a good tablespoon for my halved recipe.   

The dough has toasted coconut (duh, the title) and I was out of vanilla extract at the time, so I used some pure coconut flavoring instead.  Slice the dough in to 1/2 inch slices and coat them in granulated sugar then bake.  After they are baked and cooled, dip half of each cookie in melted chocolate.  I used Ghirardelli 60% cacao chips. 

The cookies are definitely very orange flavored and had a great coconut chew to them.  The chocolate covered bites were better than the plain halves.  Overall a really good cookie!

You can join the monthly Cookie Carnival, too.  Check out the details on Tami’s blog, Tami's Kitchen Table Talk.