After that unbelievably tasty Moroccan Beef Stew, I’m still feeling the need for dessert. Moroccan, of course! And what better way to dessert than with butter cookies and a cup of tea? Or a glass of milk if you prefer something cold. This Ghreyba recipe checks all those boxes and it has coconut, which I adore. I think we have something here, but there’s only one way to know for sure, and that’s to make these cookies. Let’s get to it!
These coconut Moroccan cookies are made with semolina flour. Covered in powder sugar and with a hint of orange.
The Ingredients
With just seven ingredients, this ghreyba recipe promises to be super simple, and I’m all for that. Being a devout coconut lover, I had a couple of bags of grated coconut in my pantry. That left me to shop for the rest of the ingredients, and my regular grocery store had most of them.
They didn’t have the semolina flour, though, so I had to order it. I found a big bag for $7.99, and it had more than enough flour for this recipe. Don’t worry about having extra—I have a couple of other recipes that will use up the leftovers.
And although I could have bought bottled orange peel, I opted for fresh (there’s nothing like fresh citrus zest!). I planned to freeze the leftovers, but I used all of the zest.
The Process
This ghreyba recipe promised to be difficult to mess up, but my luck with cookies comes and goes. Today it went, and my first try at this recipe wasn’t too successful.
The cookies tasted wonderful, but they didn’t look so good. I used a tablespoon to make what I judged to be 1.5-inch balls of dough. I was way off! The balls of dough were too big, and I only got 36 cookies out of it (the recipe says it makes 70).
To add more insult to injury, the cookies melted together, stuck to the baking sheets, and the bottoms burned a bit. The ones that didn’t break apart when I pried them off the baking sheets with a spatula were good, so I decided to give this recipe another try.
My second try went so much better! This time I used my teaspoon to measure and the cookies were much smaller. In fact, they might have been a tad too small as I managed to make 84 cookies. That’s seven dozen!
I was able to get a dozen cookies on each sheet pan, and I can fit two sheet pans in my oven. That meant I had to bake four batches of cookies. Here’s how my time was spent:
- 15 minutes to prep the first batch
- 15 minutes to bake each batch (I prepped the rest of the cookies while the 1st batch baked)
- 3 minutes to rest
- 1 hour 23 minutes total (not including time to cool)
Oh, and this time I lined the sheet pans with parchment paper so the cookies wouldn’t stock. The bottoms still browned thanks to the sugar caramelizing, but they didn’t stick. Also, I stumbled upon parchment sheets instead of the usual roll. These sheets are cut to size and they don’t curl up. Genius!
 recipe was outstanding! It made light, airy coconut cookies that were buttery with a hint of orange.){kind=link}