My parents’ freezer is full of various French Fridays and Baking with Julia projects. I make a lot of French Fridays dishes at home, of course, but if I’m visiting my parents, I like to cook for them, so they’ve gotten their fair share of Dorista bounty. It’s great for my mom, who is as busy as she was before she retired. She still enjoys cooking and baking, but it’s less of a priority for her now – there’s so much she wants to do with the grandkids, her friends, and her volunteering. I only baked a dozen of these sablés today and packed up the remaining 2 1/2 logs of dough and put it in the freezer for her. Next time she gets together with her friends for wine and nibbles, they’ll be ready for baking.

I think her friends will enjoy these as much as we did. A little savoury and a little sweet, olive sablés are surprisingly delicious. The recipe is a little unusual, too, incorporating grated egg yolk, potato starch, and cured olives into the usual sablé mix. The dough is much softer than traditional sablé dough, but when it’s baked, the cookie somehow achieves the familiar sandy texture.

Some members of the French Fridays crew were unable to locate potato starch (though scheduling these right around Passover made it much easier than it might have been at other times of year), and corn starch was the substitution of choice. Check the link at the bottom of this post to see how that worked out for folks.

I hope that last week’s long weekend was relaxing for everyone and for those who celebrated Passover or Easter, that it was filled with family, friends, and food.

You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Pierre Hermé’s Olive Sablés