Sicilian Fig Cookies are hands-down my favorite Christmas cookie. I make them every single year, not just for my family, but as gifts for many of our friends. Nobody makes a cookie like this – your great-grandma might’ve, but no one does anymore – and I’ve never seen one in a bakery. So old-fashioned. Naturally sweet, but not particularly sugary. Rich fig filling. Light, flaky cookie. It’s a cookie with strong pastry aspirations. Completely delicious!

Ingredients for 4 dozen cookies:

FOR THE DOUGH:

11 oz. bread flour (2 cups)
9 oz. cake flour (2 cups – see notes)
5/8 oz. baking powder (1½ Tbs)
¼ tsp (heaping) coarse salt
3½ oz. sugar (½ cup)
6¾ oz. vegetable shortening (1 cup)
1 large egg (1¾ oz.)
4¼ oz. milk (½ cup)
¾ oz. vanilla (1 Tbs)

FOR THE FILLING:

12½ oz. dried (black mission) figs (2 cups, about 37 figs) 
8 oz. pitted, dried (Medjool) dates (2 cups, about 14-34 dates) 
7 oz. raisins (1½ cups)
4 oz. walnuts or almonds (⅔ cup)
5¾ oz. honey (½ cup)
5¼ oz. orange marmalade (½ cup)
1 tsp cinnamon
1 large egg white beaten with 1 Tbs water for egg wash
4 oz. powdered sugar (1 cup)
½ oz. milk (1 Tbs)

How to do make the dough:

1. Whisk the flour, baking powder, and salt together into a large bowl. Add the sugar and whisk again. Work shortening into the mixture with a pastry cutter until it resembles a coarse meal.
2. In a bowl, beat the egg, milk, and vanilla together. Add to the flour mixture and work the dough with your hands – in the bowl – until it comes together and is no longer sticky.
3. Turn the dough out onto an un-floured work surface and knead for 5 minutes, or until smooth. Quite a workout, wasn’t it? You might be tempted to think, “Ugh! This is too much work!” Don’t think of it that way. Instead, think, “Hey, I just got a fantastic forearm workout while making cookies!” Trust me, doing this by hand produces the best results.
4. Cut the dough into 4 (9 oz.) pieces, wrap each piece in plastic wrap, and chill for at least 45 minutes, or up to a week or more.

How to make the filling:

5. If any of the dried fruits are hard and/or very chewy, soak them in hot water for no more than 30 minutes to soften them. Then, dry them with paper towels.
6. Finely chop the dried fruits and the nuts (see notes). Place the mixture in a large mixing bowl, add the honey, cinnamon, marmalade, and mix well. The mixture will be thick. Set aside.

How to assemble, bake, and glaze the cookies:

7. Line two cookie sheets with Silpats.
8. Divide the filling into quarters. Work with one quarter at a time, keeping the others in the fridge. Divide the filling quarter into 12 equal portions (about 1½ Tbs each). Roll each filling portion into a cylinder between your palms. Set aside.
9. Work with one of the dough quarters at a time, keeping the others in the fridge. Lightly flour the dough and roll it out to a 12-inch square. Cut the dough into 4-x-3-inch rectangles.

You have to roll this dough somewhat thinner than 1/16-inch in order to get it to the correct dimensions. Start by flouring, rolling, rotating, and flipping constantly. Once you get it to the point that it’s no longer flippable, start working on your square. Do this by rolling once in the following directions: north, south, east, west, northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest – always working from the center, out. Then, use a ruler to push the dough’s edges toward the center, straightening the edges and bumping the dough into a square shape. Keep this up until the edges start measuring 12 inches. Once that starts happening, roll only in the short directions.

10. Do this for each cookie: place a filling cylinder along one of the long ends of a dough rectangle. Roll the cookie up like a cigar. Pinch the ends closed and fold them under. Place the cookie on the Silpat, seam side down. Let the assembled cookies rest in the fridge as you work with the next dough and filling quarter.

When you’re ready to roll, use a bench scraper to help get you started. The long edges of each rectangle should perfectly meet, or overlap barely, when you roll the cookies up.

These cookies won’t spread at all, so feel free to load up your cookie sheets.

11. Preheat the oven to 350ºF just before working with your final dough and filling quarters.
12. Retrieve a sheet full of cookies from the fridge. Gently coax the cookies into shallow crescents. Try not to let them split as you do this, but if they do, don’t fret about it so long as the split doesn’t go through more than half the cookie’s width.
13. With a sharp knife, make 2 or 3 diagonal slits in the top – or vertical slits along the outer side – of each crescent, being careful not to scratch the Silpat. Push the cookies into full crescents. This should open up your slits a bit.

If any of your cookies split when you’re initially forming the crescents, vertical slits along the outer side of the crescent will help disguise this by hiding it in plain sight.

14. Brush each cookie thoroughly – top and sides – with the egg wash.
15. Bake for 25 minutes, or until just beginning to turn a light, golden brown. Let cookies cool on the sheet for a few minutes, and then transfer to wire racks to cool completely.
16. To the powdered sugar, add the milk. Stir vigorously until no lumps remain. Drizzle this glaze over the fully-cooled cookies.

NOTES:

Instead of bread and cake flour, you can substitute 4 cups of all-purpose flour.

Instead of all the chopping, you can process the fruits and nuts in a food processor, or push them through a meat grinder on a “coarse” setting. I like texture that these procedures produce, but I like the way the chopped filling looks.

You can be flexible about the filling ingredients, so long as you wind up with 27½ oz. of fruit and 4 oz. of nuts. For instance, I’ve swapped out some of the fruits with dried cranberries, dried strawberries, and apricots. I’ve used pistachios for the nut. I’ve swapped out other jam flavors, but when I have, I find that the addition of the zest of two oranges seems like a good idea. Truth is, it’s kind of important, even if you follow the directions as written. What you need from the orange is a sharp, citrusy, bitterness to balance the sweetness of all the other ingredients. You should get this from a good marmalade, but more and more, I find that the bitterness has been all but completely bred out of commercial marmalades. So you may want a bit of orange peel no matter what.

Once you’ve made the filling, you can keep it, tightly covered and refrigerated, for many days before proceeding with the rest of the recipe.

The backstory

I happened upon Mary Ann Esposito baking these Sicilian Fig Cookies on Ciao Italia, on  PBS WTTW, while channel surfing. Old-school show, old-school chef, old-school cookie. They’ve become a Christmas tradition at my house – though they’d be welcome any time of year. They have a long shelf life and freeze perfectly. I’ve converted the measurements to weight, tweaked the directions quite a bit, and provided copious notes.

Sicilian Fig Cookies

This content was not solicited, sponsored, or written in exchange for anything – not by Ms. Esposito, not by PBS, nor the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique-Council (FIG) … not by anyone.

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