Author Notes
Excerpted from The Gourmet Cookie Book (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) and slightly adapted.
"Preparing for Christmas, Gourmet's editors suggested a few mail-order gifts. These included: 6 live Maine lobsters, packed in seaweed and shipped in a free kettle ($9.92); a brace of Texas pheasants ($9); three 2-foot-long Louisiana sugarcanes ($1.19); a dozen sweet, stringless Colorado Pascal celery stalks "in a gay box" ($5.75); 3 Cornish pullets from the Danish humorist and musician Victor Borge, who bragged that his birds ate better than he did ($12.50); and 8 dozen fresh Long Island oysters in the shell ($5.50). If you wanted to offer your friends sweet benne wafers from South Carolina however, the only option was to make them yourself. A tin of the thin, chewy, caramelized sesame-seed cookies ("benne" is an African word for "sesame"), with their stark nutty goodness, is a truly wonderful gift." —Food52
Ingredients
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1 1/2 tablespoons
butter, softened
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1 cup
light brown sugar
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1
egg, beaten
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2 tablespoons
flour
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1/4 teaspoon
salt
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1 teaspoon
vanilla
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1/2 cup
hulled sesame seeds
Directions
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Preheat the oven to 350° F.
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Cream together the butter and brown sugar until light and smooth.
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Add the egg, flour, salt, vanilla, and sesame seeds. Mix.
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Drop from a teaspoon onto a cookie sheet lined with Silpat. Flatten the wafers with a knife dipped in ice water to flatten.
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Bake for 6 minutes.
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