Benne Wafers
Food52
Photo by James Ransom
- Serves
- 4 dozen
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."
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 tablespoon butter, softened
- 1 cup light brown sugar
- 1 egg, beaten
- 2 tablespoon flour
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1/2 cup hulled sesame seeds
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Directions
- Step 1
Preheat the oven to 350° F.
- Step 2
Cream together the butter and brown sugar until light and smooth.
- Step 3
Add the egg, flour, salt, vanilla, and sesame seeds. Mix.
- Step 4
Drop from a teaspoon onto a cookie sheet lined with Silpat. Flatten the wafers with a knife dipped in ice water to flatten.
- Step 5
Bake for 6 minutes.