Make Your Own Fake Petit Ecoliers

If you are anything like me (and why wouldn't you be?), you find Le Petit Ecolier the almost perfect cookie. Their buttery cookiness, their chocolately chocolateyness, their scallopy edges, the little schoolboy imprinted right into the chocolate. They're so compact, so tasty, so . . . expensive. At around $4 for a 5.29 oz box (plus the environmental nightmarishness of the plastic container inside the box), they used to be for special occasions only.

It really is a beautiful cookie.

Did I just say used to be? Yeah baby. Because I am going to teach you how to make your own Petit Ecoliers in no time at all for less than half the cost. And this isn't one of the ridiculous Pinterest DIY claims about making something just like something else for just pennies but actually takes about three days, requires buying specialty products (like silver spray paint, glycerin, and stuff like that) from specialty stores, and then looks or feels nothing like the so-called expensive original in the first place and would probably been more environmentally friendly to have gone and bought at Target. 

No, this is the real deal. I find that graham crackers and Nestle's chocolate paired together taste almost exactly as good as a Petit Ecolier. Particularly if you haven't eaten a Petit Ecolier in a long time and have forgotten exactly how perfectly buttery that scalloped cookie tasted. Turn off your memory, get yourself a box of Honey Grahams and a bag of snack size Nestle chocolate bars. Simply break the graham cracker in half, then half again (they are conveniently scored to make this easy.) Sandwich a piece of chocolate between two of the graham cracker quarters, et voila, you have a Petit Ecolier-like experience.

The pseudo versions lacks the visual panache of a Petit Ecolier, but has an appealingly rustic simplicity of its own.

I have not done a side by side taste test of the two cookies, but in my dim memory of my last Petit Ecolier, this little version stacks up pretty well. Feel free to disagree, and I may have to admit I've become one of those Pinterest DIY people. However, you will never catch me spray-painting a doormat silver, scrubbing it down with steel wool, hanging it on the wall, then claiming it looks just like wrought iron.