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LunaCafe

Moon over Tunisia (Baharat) Butter Cookies

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With a generous dose of fragrant spices—sweet paprika, black pepper, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and nutmeg—these cookies are likely to be like none you have ever experienced.

Moon over Tunisia Butter Cookies | LunaCafe
The flavor of these intensely buttery cookies is definitely exotic. It conjures up scenes of ancient ruins, mysterious nights, and distant moons.

With a generous dose of fragrant spices—sweet paprika, black pepper, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and nutmeg—these cookies are likely to be like none you have ever experienced.

Unless of course you tried my Garam Masala & Candied Ginger Cookies from last year’s Starry Night collection. Those are wonderfully exotic as well.

When eating these cookies, I always think of Scheherazade and the collection of stories known as One Thousand and One Nights. Arabian dancers in flowing silk garments spring to life in my imagination. And since this is my fantasy, I’m one of them.

Then, after all that dancing, I prepare a lovely pot of tea and present these rare and precious cookies to the bad-ass king, who as you know has already killed 1000 women. Only to his cookies, I add a little something extra.

And thus, after the king dies in his sleep later that night, Scheherazade and I grab all the silver we can carry, jump on our Arabian horses (the fastest in the world) and race across the Persian desert, all the way to Paris, where she sets up a renowned story-telling workshop and me an artisan cookie atelier next door. Her stories and my cookies become the talk of Paris, and we both live happily ever after.

P.S. We thought about naming these cookies Moon over Persia Butter Cookies, but Moon over Tunisia has such a better ring to it, don’t you agree? And besides, we raced through Tunisia by moonlight on Christmas Eve before stowing away on a cargo ship bound for France. We gave the horses, a bag of silver, and the rest of the cookies to a couple of mop-haired street urchins.

Jump to Recipe

Here’s the entire LunaCafe Twelve Days of Christmas Cookies: Silver Bells collection. If you bake along, one cookie a day from December 1st to December 12th, you’ll have a wonderful selection of holiday cookies to share with family and friends, with time to spare.

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About Susan S. Bradley

Intrepid cook, food writer, culinary instructor, creator of the LunaCafe blog, author of Pacific Northwest Palate: Four Seasons of Great Cooking, and former director of the Northwest Culinary Academy.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Serena Flannery

    Help! Where has the recipe gone?! I bookmarked this recipe earlier this week so I could bake them this weekend. Now the page still exists, but the recipe for both the baharat mixure and the cookie are gone. I am heartbroken. Was so looking forward to trying these exotic little confections.

  2. Mariano

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  3. Mariano

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  5. Bastet

    Umm no I read all intros, prefaces, etc. I learned early that much can be garnered about what you are reading if you read introductions first. That, and my English teacher in grade school used to quiz us on them 😉

  6. Phaedra

    Hello again 😀

    This was the other batch of cookies of your lovely recipes that I baked up tonight for our family’s Christmas Eve celebrations tomorrow – well I guess technically today for me ;). I was so enticed by the aromas (and then the flavour of the cookie dough ;)) that I couldn’t wait to get them into the oven… but I did wait, thankfully. So deliciously different and evocative of spice markets (or spice areas of markets) I’ve been to elsewhere in the world (including the-closest-I’ve-ever-been-to-Tunisia’s Egypt). I’m so excited to share these with the more adventurous of my relatives… and then a friend that loves anything Moroccan, and then a coworker that loves these spices… maybe I’ll find a mop-haired urchin on the way, too 😉

    Off to dream, all gleefully sugar and spice (and everything nice?) filled. Thanks again! 😀

    • Susan S. Bradley

      Hi Phaedra! It must have been you I created this cookie for. So happy you like them. 🙂

  7. Susan

    Alright Susan, you got to me. I love a baked good with a story! Especially if it inspires a cookie! Or was it the other way around? Whatever! These have my attention! I really like the meat tenderizer treatment. I love to find a new use for a specialty utensil as much as a good made-up story. I also want what inspired this episode of baking! Ho-ho-ho and pass the wine? It was wine, right?

    • Susan S. Bradley

      Susan, LOL! You may be the only person who actually read the intro. The cookies themselves were inspired by a love for evocative spice blends, which I always make myself. Looking around the kitchen for Christmas cookie inspiration, I spotted the little jar with marking pen inscription “My Baharat.” The dough balls were cooling in the frig within minutes. For the later tie-in with Scheherazade, it was late one night after 10-12 hours at the day job. I was fading fast, but had to get the post out before closing down the computer. So I started cruising the web, found the Arabian Dancers on YouTube and the post then wrote itself. I reread it a couple of times, thinking “This is nuts” but then also thought, “Oh heck, no one will read it anyway.” 🙂
      P.S No wine was involve, only Christmas tea. 🙂
      P.S.S. I wonder how hard it would be to create designs for an implement like a meat pounder that could be used as a cookie stamp? I spent so much time working with cookie stamps this year and was mostly disappointed because the impressions are too shallow to create good definition in the baked cookie. The meat pounder works way better.

    • Susan S. Bradley

      Dana, thanks so much! Wouldn’t these be perfect on the beach at Manzanita with a jug of hot cider? Bundled up in 15 layers of Patagonia clothing of course. 🙂

Trackbacks

  5. […] cardamom, cloves, and nutmeg. But instead of using the spice blend in a savory braise, I used it in Moon over Tunisia (Baharat) Cookies. The aroma and flavor were hauntingly evocative. After that success, I began playing around with a […]