Black Sugar Chocolate Heart Cookies | A handmade Qixi gift, piped by hand

Some gifts only work because someone made them by hand. These chocolate heart cookies are that kind of gift.

They were baked for Qixi, the night for handmade tokens between people who like each other. The dough is dark with cocoa, piped through a star tip into open hearts, crisp where the ridges catch the heat and soft through the middle. Once cooled, each heart is filled with melted strawberry chocolate and dusted with crushed freeze-dried strawberry, so a tart pink note lands against the deep cocoa.

What holds it all together is the sugar.

Traditional Black Sugar Powder from Ship Brand is milled fine, so it creams straight into softened butter without graininess and carries a rounded molasses warmth through the whole cookie. That is why these read rich but never cloying, sweet with the edge taken off.

Shop it here: Traditional Black Sugar Powder

Recipe: Black Sugar Chocolate Heart Cookies

Makes a small batch of piped hearts. A short, honest bake you can do in an afternoon and box up the same evening.

Ingredients

• 80g butter, softened
• 20g Traditional Black Sugar Powder (古法黑糖粉)
• 25g milk
• 105g cake flour (low-gluten)
• about 8g cocoa powder
• Strawberry chocolate, melted, for the filling
• Crushed freeze-dried strawberry, for topping

Method

1. Beat the 80g softened butter with the 20g black sugar powder until pale and fluffy.
2. Mix in the 25g milk until the batter is smooth and pipeable.
3. Sift in the 105g cake flour and the cocoa powder. Fold gently so the dough stays tender and does not toughen.
4. Spoon into a piping bag fitted with a star tip and pipe open heart shapes onto a lined tray.
5. Bake at 170°C for 18 minutes, then let the hearts cool completely.
6. Melt the strawberry chocolate and fill each cooled heart. Chill to set, then dust with crushed freeze-dried strawberry.

A note from the kitchen: fold the flour in just until it disappears. Overworking the dough is the one thing that turns a short, melting cookie into a firm one, and the whole point of these is that they give way the moment you bite.

Boxed and tied, they say what a shop-bought gift cannot: someone spent the afternoon on you. The fine-milled black sugar is the quiet reason they taste the way they do.

Ship Brand (帆船牌) is the retail line of Yuen Tung Sugar Factory Industrial Company Limited. Sugar refined in Hong Kong since 1987. Shop the collection.