I have a friend who likes green tea. I mean really, really likes green tea.  When I took her to a pastry shop in the East Village to try their green tea mousse cake, she ordered a green tea slushie to go with it. Green tea mints can be found scattered all over her bedroom, and, in case they don’t leave her breath sufficiently verdant, she brushes her teeth with Thai green tea toothpaste. After I had given her a pot de crème tutorial, what do you think was the first flavor she attempted?

As flavor obsessions go, green tea is relatively benign–my matcha-loving friend is unlikely to doctor a dish I’ve prepared with a sprinkling of green powder. The same cannot be said for the chili fiends among us–those insolent, one-note eaters who’ll splatter or scatter Tabasco/Sriracha/red pepper flakes on anything from a lovingly prepared pasta dish to a gently seasoned piece of fish. “If I had intended for dish x to taste like a Buffalo wing,” I have had to restrain myself from saying, “I would have covered it in hot sauce myself. But I hadn’t, and this is the last time I’m making you dinner.”

I don’t know that my palate is dominated by any single flavor craving. Certainly, I learn towards the acidic: I prefer my wine thin and sour, and if there’s a lemon tart on the dessert menu, I’ll probably order it. But I lack the utter commitment to an ingredient that drives grown women to grunt for chocolate, and grown-ups of both sexes to chant “Bacon makes everything better!” (Does it? Does it really? I can think of several things that bacon doesn’t improve: crème brûlée, beverages of any kind, and, in defiance of a rapidly growing movement I will never join, chocolate cupcakes.)

As you can probably guess, I made these cookies for my friend, the green tea fanatic. They’re advance payment for the photography lessons I hope to receive from her–in between bites of green-hued desserts, she somehow managed to earn an MFA in the medium.

I started off with what was left of Smitten Kitchen’s green tea shortbread dough–you’ll remember, I served matcha snowflake cookies with spiced lychees and vanilla pots de crème at last week’s dinner party–and baked them into thin, crisp discs.

Using my trusty Ziploc bag/pastry tip combo, I then piped a mixture of toasted coconut flakes, cream cheese and honey onto the underside of one cookie, and used another to seal the deal. (To toast coconut, scatter flakes on a baking sheet and heat in a 325-degree oven for about five minutes.)

The resulting sandwich cookie is like a genteel version of the whoopie pie (though probably no less calorific, for all its refinement.) Bitter tea combines with golden coconut to produce a flavor at once warm and herbaceous–a little like pandan leaves.

I think she’ll go nuts.

Chomp.

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