Looking for a good Halloween sweet to bake up before Beggar's Night? Here's the famous Thomas Keller Oreos (TKO) — crunchy chocolate cookies, with a white chocolate ganache sandwiched in between them. And, just for Halloween, these are in the shape of bats!
This recipe comes courtesy of Bouchon Bakery and their Halloween lineup of treats right now. Of course, you'll need a bat cookie cutter or template to make these suitably Halloweenish (although you could just make basic round Oreos; everyone would still be happy). Bat cookie cutters are probably still available at craft stores like JoAnns and Michaels, and cooking supply places like Sur La Table.
If you don't have a cookie cutter, you can also download and print out these templates from Martha Stewart:
• Bad Things Template - Includes many Halloween-themed templates, like a bat, black cat, Gothic letters, and an owl.
Thomas Keller Oreo Bat Sandwich Cookies
Makes 6-8 cookies
For the Chocolate Sablé Dough
12 ounce butter
8.5 ounces sugar
13.4 ounces all purpose flour
Pinch baking soda
Pinch salt
4.5 ounces cocoa powder
In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar together using a paddle on medium speed. Sift the dry ingredients together and add to the butter and sugar mixture until combined. Refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes. Roll the dough out to a thickness of 1/8 of an inch. Cut out cookies into desired shapes. Refrigerate the cut cookies for 20 minutes. Bake at 325°F for 12 minutes and let cool on a rack.
For the White Chocolate Ganache Filling
7 ounces heavy cream
7 ounces white chocolate
1 ounces butter
Chop the white chocolate and place in a bowl. Bring the heavy cream to a boil and pour over the chopped white chocolate and stir until smooth. Add the butter and stir until incorporated. Allow the cream mixture to cool. Transfer the mixture to the bowl of electric mixer. Using the whisk attachment, whip until light and the mixture holds its shape. Refrigerate until needed.
To Assemble:
Pipe the filling onto one cookie and top with another.
Previous Bouchon Bakery Recipes:
• Mother's Day Treat: Bouchon Bakery Strawberry Paddies
• Rice Krispie Easter Eggs from Bouchon Bakery
• Chocolate Bouchons from Thomas Keller
(Image and recipe courtesy of Bouchon Bakery)
8 Small Cooking Habits That Make a Big Difference
Oscar Night Cocktail Recipe: "The Lincoln" White Whiskey Margarita
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Kart Serving Tray b...
Study Determines This Is the Most Relaxing Song Ever
Katharine & James' Glamorous Family Home in London
Comments (19)
White chocolate ganache inside an oreo-type cookie sounds so many orders of magnitude better than the standard dull frosting.
I curse my currently-packed up kitchen.
SO. CUTE.
damnit. 'cause I didn't have enough to do already...
Hmm. Wonder if you could do a marshmallow cream instead. Would it be too sticky to assemble?
These are adorable!
OMG, thank you for this! Sure to be a Halloween hit.
I've heard great things about the TKOs. I can't wait to try them. Thanks for posting the recipe!
THANK YOU! This is one of my all-time favorite cookies, but I live in a city that doesn't have Bouchon *sniff*. Every time I'm in NYC, I go there to buy TKOs. And I had just gotten back from Vegas where I picked up some of these bat ones when Shanti emailed me a link to this page. Yay!
I'm ABSOLUTELY making this for a Halloween get-together. But are those ounces by weight (16/lb) or volume (8/cup)? And is cocoa powder meant to be sweetened or unsweetened? Somehow I have both in the house!
Has anyone managed to make these successfully? Ours were a disaster! We suspect the recipe is missing something... perhaps eggs?
This was an absolute disaster for me from the very start. What a total mess... I thought it was my error when rolling out the dough didn't really work, or using the cookie cutters was a sticky nightmare. But when I finally pulled all that together and baked them and they just melted into burnt piles, I knew the recipe was flawed. I got up early this morning to make these for a trip today to my in-laws, how frustrating :( Please be more careful about posting recipes on here, this is really a letdown. After some internet searches, it appears that the procedure for making the dough that is printed here is incorrect. Here is the version that I found over and over again on other sites (wish I would have done this search last night):
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Prepare two baking sheets by lining them with parchment paper or Silpats.
Combine the sugar, flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt in an electric mixer. With the mixer still running on low speed, add the butter a few pieces at a time. Let the dough continue mixing until it comes together - it should go from looking like pebbles or cornmeal to a cohesive mass.
Turn the dough out onto a floured working surface and work into a solid block. Divide the block into two pieces.
Working with one piece at a time, roll out between two sheets of parchment paper until 1/8" thick. Using a 2-in cookie cutter, cut out shapes and place on the baking sheets about 1 inch apart (cookies will spread a bit in the oven).
Bake the cookies for about 12 to 15 minutes, rotating the sheets halfway through baking time. Remove from oven and let cool on wire racks for a few minutes (cookies will be too soft to move at first), then transfer cookies to wire racks and let finish cooling.
This was a disaster for me too. :-( It was a huge dissapointment since I bought new cookie cutters for it, as well as a piping bag. I thought I had done something wrong, but my friend tried them the same day, and she had to throw them all away!
I think there's something wrong with the ingredient measurements. I measured by weight. Did anyone do this by mass? I suspect there's too much butter in here.
I added more flour to roll out the dough and actually did use two sheets of parchment paper (this is how i usually roll out cookies), so even though the dough was sticky, i was able to roll it out and cut the cookies.
But when baked, the cookies were too soft and crumbly to easily assemble, even after I cooled them for 2 hours! The oven needs to be higher than 325F. I increased to 375F for my second batch and got better results. But they did not look like the picture above. They rose slightly and looked almost like cracked brownies. :-(
I saved the ones I could, and assembled the cookies. The frosting is actually good - but I did not add the butter since other recipes online for TKO's did not call for the butter and it made it yellowy instead of white!.
The kids didn't seem to mind too much, since the taste was good. But not what i expected and it created a mess in my kitchen. :-(
I wish we had thought of rolling it out between 2 sheets of parchment paper, that probably would have helped a lot! We were eventually able to finish making some of these and they are actually pretty tasty despite being such a mess. What we ended up doing was sticking the dough in the freezer for about 20 mins instead of the fridge before rolling it out... the colder it was, the easier it was to handle. Then, when rolling it out we just used lots and lots of flour to keep it from sticking so much to the rolling pin and surface... I'm not sure we have EVER made such a mess in our kitchen!
The cookies definitely didn't hold their shape very well as they cooked - we ended up with amorphous blobs rather than the stars we were going for. I'm wondering if we should have refrigerated them longer beforehand. I still think EGGS would have helped! We cooked them at 325 and they came out OK for us. They were pretty fragile though, and definitely required some care when constructing the final product.
What a disaster! I attempted to bake these on Halloween. The cookies did not hold their shape as they baked, they looked more like little black blobs when I took them out of the oven. On top of that, they crumbled to peices when I attempted to transfer them to cooling racks. Boo hoo!
I still had the frosting leftover from the cookie disaster, so I made the Cooks Illustrated Chocolate Sable Cookies and they came out perfect! Delicious.
These looked like dogs to me. Especially if tilted.
On side looks like the head with nose and big ears. Then the other side looks like two legs and a tail.
so, I've made these cookies a couple times but I still can't get the white chocolate filling right.
Has anyone else had this problem? Every time I try to mix the white chocolate with the cream and butter I just end up with a grainy broken mess. I feel like something isn't quite right, especially considering that Thomas Keller's recipes are usually rock-solid.
Doing more research for this recipe I find variations that don't involve the butter in the filling. I haven't tried it yet but it makes sense that the butter could make this break. I'll try it again and and see if I can make a filling that isn't a disgusting mess.
Old post but I made these today, and they came out great. I followed the cookie recipe from Kellers ad hoc cookbook and it noted to cut the cookies without taking off excess then cool for 15 or so minutes in order to transfer cookies on a silpat or parchment cookie sheet. He also recommends only rolling once again for more cookies. The ganiache filling I used did not have the addition of butter. And It was about a 1/3 of cream to 10 oz of white chocolate chips. I let it cool for six hours and then whipped by hand (too lazy to wash the mixer) for a few minutes. I let it stand for 40 minutes or so, and I came back to a whipped yet slightly stiff filling. I hope this helps those who didn't get great results or are trying to attempt this recipe.
Awful! I thought this recipe would be a cute thing to try for a movie night with friends, but NOTHING worked. The 'dough' is more like a sticky batter that you cannot roll or shape, it does not maintain its shape, the chocolate filling is impossible to whip. A waste of money and time for me. I am very disappointed that this was posted on here when it is, somehow, wrong.