Langues de Chat Cookies

Jul 21

Jul 21 Langues de Chat Cookies

Langues de Chat are a lovely, light and crisp French butter cookie named for the shape of a cat’s tongue. Ah, French humor. They’d be perfect with a cup of tea or peaking out the top of a bowl of ice cream.

The cookies are easy to make, though you do need to pipe them out to achieve the right shape. If you’re new to piping, this is a good recipe to start with because you just need to pipe a straight line with a simple, round piping tip and the dough is pretty forgiving. I suggest drawing simple 3-inch long lines on the back of your parchment paper so you have something to follow. You can smooth out any funny edges with a damp finger.

The recipe I used is a straightforward one from BBC Food that even includes a short how-to video. (You can avoid the presenter’s problem of powdered sugar flying everywhere by simply starting at the lowest setting of your mixer then turning it up once it starts to blend.)

It’s not part of the recipe, but I dipped the ends in melted semisweet chocolate. I achieved the look of that cute cloche hat by draping the chocolate cross-wise across the cookie with a spoon a few times once it had cooled a bit and thickened.

( I earn a tiny commission from purchases made via product links on this page.)

Langues de Chat Recipe:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/langues_de_chat_biscuits_51182

Yield:
The recipe says 20-25, but I ended up with more like 35 cookies.

Difficulty:
Easy

Just a few tips and things to know:

For U.S. bakers:

The recipe calls for icing sugar, which is just another name for powdered sugar or confectioners sugar.
The flour equates to a very loosely packed 1 cup in volume, but it’s always better to weigh your ingredients if you can.

For everyone:

These are best the day they’re made. After that they start to lose their crispness, but I’ve discovered that they freeze nicely. My husband has been eating them right out of the freezer. (Ok, I have been too.)
If you’d like to dip them in semi-sweet chocolate too, 1 cup / 6 ounces / 170 grams should be enough for the entire batch. Be sure to use chopped chocolate or melting wafers, not chocolate chips. Depending on brand, they won’t always melt smoothly.