Homemade Dark Chocolate Oreos w/Vanilla Bean Center

I have a confession: I don’t go crazy over Oreos.  I LIKE Oreos just fine, but cookies in general are maybe 4th or 5th in my dessert Top 5  (Behind pie.  And cheesecake!  Ohh… cheese.)

In any case, that doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate how comforting they are and how tasty and delightful.  So when I saw a local baking company in the Ferry Building carrying a homemade version with REAL vanilla bean, I knew it needed at least one taste test.  A selfless taste test.  And I’m exceptionally glad I did: Black Jet Baking Co.’s Dark Chocolate Sandwich Cookies are tiny little cookie treasures.  They have a great mix of traditional via the chocolate wafers, with a perfectly flavored spin on that too-sweet filling from the original.

For a few months, the cafe at my office starting carrying these cookies and it was perfect- I could get my fix anytime.  But they’ve recently switched vendors and so I was stuck.  Guess I would just have to make my own homemade dark chocolate Oreos and try to recreate that amazing vanilla bean center.

Like a lot of home cooks I know, I started with Smitten Kitchen in hopes of finding a suitable recipe.  I was in luck!  SHE TOTALLY HAS ONE.  I mean, she doesn’t just have a homemade Oreo recipe itself, she has the EXACTLY PERFECT BASE.  With a couple of very slight modifications, I knew I could get very very close to my inspiration cookie.

Creating a dark chocolate version would be the simplest part: sub dark chocolate cocoa for the regular dutch-processed cocoa.  I used Hershey’s Special Dark since it was the only version available at my local store, but I would think any version would work.  One benefit of subbing with the Hershey’s version is that it is a mix of dutch-processed and regular cocoa so I didn’t need to make any ingredient alterations to account for the cocoa change.  If you need a different kind of cocoa based on your store’s offerings, check on the comments on the Smitten Kitchen post for tons of great tips (like using baking soda to prevent the wafers from rising like a whoopie pie!)

The vanilla bean filling was going to be a little different since it used shortening.  I’m not entirely anti-shortening, but the idea of eating it without cooking it in a baked good was a little off-putting for me personally.  Instead, I subbed all butter and added a bit of cornstarch to achieve a good filling consistency.  Throw in some vanilla beans along with the extract and I was ready to go.

You’ll notice that I made another slight change in the process: how I create my cookie wafers.  Since my dough was nice and cool (thanks, Winter!), I was able to easily roll the dough into small balls.  This was perfect to ensure that the cookies were as uniform in size as possible.

Aren’t they so pretty with their deep, dark color?  Once I arranged them on the sheet, I used one of my butter wrappers to grease the bottom of a drinking glass and used that the flatten the cookies on the sheet.

Oooh, one last tip!  Don’t just toss your vanilla bean pod after you’ve scraped it- it will still work great for some vanilla bean sugar!

I hope you make these and I hope you love them.  They are a great recreation of the original- not an exact replica but absolutely delicious in their own right.