#5. Palmiers

These are usually made with puff pastry, which of course is delicious, but to make your own puff pastry is time consuming, so here's an alternative to puff pastry. It is nice and buttery, and extremely flakey, try it. And if you really want to use puff, then you can just thaw a frozen box, even easier.

Dough:
1 1/4C all purpose flour
1T sugar
1/8t salt
1 cold stick of unsalted butter
4oz cream cheese, cold

Filling:
1C sugar
1t ground cardamom
2 pinches salt
Mix these together in a bowl.

In a bowl, combine flour, sugar, salt. Cut the butter into small pieces, and make small crumbs with the flour etc. Then add the cream cheese, cut into small pieces, combine roughly, so that you see the cream cheese in there. This will make a flakier dough.
Form the dough into a disc. Wrap it in plastic wrap and chill for 1 hour.

Take out the disc, put it on a good sprinkling of the sugar mixture (you will use sugar to prevent the dough from sticking, not flour, as you roll it out.). Be generous with the sugar, and keep turning it over as you roll it. It should be 1/8" thick, and a rectangular shape, 24"x 8" at least. With a pizza cutter trim the edges to make a clean rectangle. Put the rest of the sugar on top of the dough, and roll from both sides inward equal amounts, it may be overlapping the dough 3 or 4 times. The dough should not be loose in the middle, it should be nice and tightly wrapped. Then with a pizza cutter cut about 1/2" thick and place on a sheet tray lined with parchment paper. Bake in a 375F oven for about 8 minutes. When the sugar has caramelized underneath and the cookie has browned, quickly turn them over and bake for 8 more minutes, or until that side is a golden brown. Cool. If you like one side can be dipped in chocolate.