Hi friends! *waves* This summer has been crazy and, for the majority of it, I haven’t even been home, so From Dill to Dracula has taken a hit. That being said, I have a lot of fun blog posts coming your way, and I’d like to kick it off with a series: My Cousin’s Cookie Collection.
Growing up, us four cousins on my dad’s side each had a cookie recipe named after each other. This recipe was always called Heather’s Cookies, so named after my eldest cousin. Of course, the downside to this is that I don’t have an official name for these cookies—lost in years and with age. And even though I’ve tried scouring the internet (and Pinterest) to find the proper name, I’ve come up empty handed.
Because this recipe uses biscuits, the only recipes that tended to come up were similar to my Salam de Biscuiti recipe, but this one is still… different. The addition of coffee (the instant variety) and a layering of cream to biscuit make it more of a cake than a cookie (even though that’s how we referred to them as kids).
Since I couldn’t very well title the recipe Heather’s Cookies, the best descriptor for this recipe I could come up with was Romanian Chocolate Layer Cake, or tortul de ciocolată din România (pronounced tour-tulle day ch-oh-k-oh-lah-tah dean Rome-ah-knee-ah).
This recipe is one of many I received from my grandmother in Romanian, and have since had my mom translate for me. Trying to translate recipes myself hasn’t gone so well in the past. Case in point:
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But I digress. It’s time for some food, right?
My husband likened this to a chocolate lasagna mixed with the texture of a tiramisu, and he’s pretty accurate on both counts. The layers of biscuit and cream are a lot like a traditional Italian lasagna, and because the biscuits are so porous, they absorb some of the cream and become soft, cakey bites. Yum! Enough talking. It’s time for some food, right?
Since there are four cousins, this will be the first of four recipes in my Cousin’s Cookies Collection. They’ll be posted in the order of the cousin’s age, so stay tuned for my very own cookies (“Ashley’s Cookies“) next!
↓ Recipe below ↓
—But first, some pretty pictures—