I haven’t made imqarets since 2020, but I happened to have a surplus of dates(the dried fruit, not the Tinder kind), and I wanted to use them up! Imqarets are a Maltese biscuit, which can be either baked or fried, that is stuffed with a date mixture that is seasoned with orange blossom water. They are floral and hearty, and I wanted to make a cookie with a similar flavor profile to those. This cookie sort of evolved as I was making it, because I started first with a gjetost cheese shortbread dough. Gjetost cheese is a Norwegian cheese made by slowly caramelizing goat milk, and it tastes like caramel, but less sweet. I am obsessed with gjetost cheese, and love pairing it with caramel-y flavors, like brown butter or dates! I was originally going to do something to the effect of a date pecan pie with a gjetost crust, but then I did not have pecans. And it was about 11pm at night when I was baking, so my options on procuring pecans was really limited. I did, however, have sesame seeds, and that was when I thought about going somewhere more Mediterranean. I still had orange blossom water and cardamom, so those, plus dates, and this gjetost cookie dough, is how the recipe came about!

With this recipe, there are essentially two components, three counting the sesame seeds that you crust the cookies with. The first is the aforementioned gjetost dough, and the second is the date paste. The date paste is the first thing I would recommend making in this recipe, since it needs time to cool down. A trick I learned when I was experimenting with Gordon Ramsay’s sticky toffee pudding recipe is that you can make an intense date paste by boiling dates with baking soda. The baking soda breaks down the dates faster due to oxidizing them, which is actually desirable in this case, as it makes the dates softer and develop a strong molasses flavor. That date paste is seasoned with a little cardamom for fragrance. The dough is made by gjetost cheese, which substitutes out some of the butter and the cheese, and seasoned with orange blossom water for that delicate background fragrance. We are filling and rolling the dough around the date paste, which can be a little sticky and messy, but the sesame seeds help with adding more texture, and sealing the filling into the cookie itself! My friends actually refer to these cookies as an upgraded Fig Newton, so if you like Fig Newtons, you will love these!

For the date paste:
2oz pitted and coarsely chopped dates
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup boiling hot water
a pinch of salt
a pinch of ground cardamom

In a bowl, toss the dates with the baking soda. Pour the dates into a pot of boiling water, and then stir that on low heat until the dates fully break down into a paste. Stir into that the salt and cardamom and transfer the mixture into another bowl. Refrigerate the paste until cool to the dough.

For the orange blossom-gjetost cookie dough:
2oz gjetost cheese
2oz unsalted butter
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 egg yolk
1 tsp orange blossom water
1 tsp vanilla extract
a pinch of salt

In a food processor, blend the gjetost cheese, butter, and flour together until a fine, crumbly dough forms. Mix into that the remaining ingredients to form a dough, and refrigerate it for at least 10 minute – if you refrigerate it for longer than 5 minutes, be sure to let the dough sit at room temperature for at least 5 minutes before attempting to roll it!

For assembly:
Toasted sesame seeds

Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface to a 6 inch by 4 inch rectangle. Spread the cooled down date paste onto the dough and roll it up into a rectangular log. Refrigerate the dough for another 5 to 10 minutes before cutting it into 1/4 inch-thick slices. Press one side of the cookie into toasted sesame seed and place the dough onto a lined sheet tray, keeping each cookie at least 2 inches apart. Bake at 375 degrees F for 12 minutes.