Un Beau Cadeau Pour Mon Chef

January 31 was my boss's ("mon chef") birthday. He's been a great manager, so I wanted to give him a personalized gift. Jasmine and I batted around a couple of ideas and settled on three finalists: honey lavendar marshmallows (since my boss had once mentioned that he loved lavendar marshmallows), brownie pudding cake (because he also loves chocolate), and my personal favorite, petite lemon curd sandwich cookies. Jasmine and I debated and weighed the merits of each: shareable/not shareable, chocolate/non-chocolate, mess, birthday-worthiness, etc.

I finally settled on the petite lemon curd cookies because they would be shareable and feel special. They're small, bite-sized sandwich cookies made with a rich buttery cookie and filled with a tart lemon curd, which is tempered by the powdered sugar that coats each cookie.

I made this recipe for the first time years ago after I found it in Gourmet magazine. I remember it took me a while because I was unfamiliar with butter cookie doughs, and I also tried to do everything the same day. This time the process was much easier by making the dough in advance to give it a chance to set, and I also made the lemon curd in advance, which was dangerous because it gave me multiple opportunities to eat a lot of it!

You can see the small cookies above. I made them in heart and star shapes. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of the finished cookies because my hands were too messy from all of the rolling and filling. But they are lovely to look at, and even more lovely to eat.

My boss was very surprised and loved them. He shared them with his friends who were visiting for the weekend, and he said they nicknamed my gift the "Devil in a Box" because even when they wanted to stop eating the cookies they couldn't, and they polished off the entire 3 or 4 dozen that weekend.