Cinq Centimes (Senegalese Peanut Cookies)

Cinq centimes are vanilla and cinnamon sugar cookies topped with peanut butter and chopped peanuts. They are sold in markets across Senegal, particularly in Dakar, and they are named after money: cinq centimes is French for five cents, a reference to their original small size, like coins. **These contain peanuts twice over, as a topping and as chopped nuts, and neither appears in the name.** The peanut is not incidental to Senegal. Groundnuts were the colonial cash crop that reshaped the country's agriculture under French rule, and they remain central to both the economy and the cooking: mafe, the peanut stew, is close to a national dish. A peanut-topped cookie sold for coins in a Dakar market sits squarely in that context rather than being a novelty. The base is a plain butter and sugar cookie with cinnamon and vanilla, chilled before rolling. Chilling matters more than it sounds, cold dough holds its shape as it bakes rather than spreading, which is what keeps these small and neat. One error in the source: its method gives an oven setting ten times higher than any domestic oven reaches, which is a misplaced decimal point. The corrected figure is used in the method below.