• Melt the kinds of butter with sugars*, and water. Bring to a boil, whisk well. Once the butter and sugar are dissolved set aside to cool down completely.
• Once the mixture is at room temperature, add flour and baking powder and knead a little. Reserve in the fridge for 30 minutes.
• When the dough is cold, roll out and cut using the cookie cutter of your choice, in around 25-35 cookies. Note: traditionally the cookies are rectangles. You can try to find a rectangular cutter for French butter cookies. Etsy provides some options.
• Bake them on a sheet of parchment paper for 12 minutes at 180ºC (375ºF), remove from oven and let cool down.
• In the meantime melt the chocolate on a double boiler.
• Pour the melted chocolate onto a parchment paper-lined tray and spread out to get a very thin layer of chocolate. Keep a little chocolate to brush the cookie for “gluing” your chocolate cutouts.
• Let the chocolate rest in the fridge until almost firm. Once ready, use the same cookie cutter or better the same shape but just a little smaller and make as many chocolate shapes as you have cookies.
• You will probably need to remelt your reserved chocolate “glue” to make it easy to apply. Just 20-30 seconds in the microwave should be enough (maybe even less). With a brush, apply a small stroke of chocolate and stick your chocolate cutout on top of each cookie. Try not to manipulate the cutouts too much otherwise, you will have fingerprints on them (or you can intentionally leave your imprint on them for added styling.

Don’t eat them all! Share with friends and family.

* If you don’t have vanilla sugar you can skip it and you don’t necessarily need to add that quantity more of regular sugar or you can add 1 tsp of vanilla bean paste, or 1 pinch of powder or extract to your 30g (1 oz) of sugar. Again this is optional. You can also just add the vanilla without adding the extra sugar.

Links:

• French cooking classes for kids & their parents in Paris