Luxens Coconut Wafers

These confections combine a very popular Turkish sweet—the wafer cookie–with a coconut flavor, one that is rarely used in Turkish cooking. The Turkish word for coconut is hindistan cevizi, meaning “Indian walnut”, which is a fitting name as coconuts are native to India and Southeast Asia. The Turkish climate isn’t warm enough for coconut palms to grow successfully. And while other tropical fruits like papayas, mangoes, and guavas have been successfully grown in Turkish greenhouses, coconut palms are too large to be grown indoors. This is likely the reason that coconut makes so few appearances in Turkish cuisine. When Turkish desserts do feature coconut, it’s almost exclusively used as a topping. These wafer cookies utilize coconut flavor in the cream filling, which makes them somewhat unique among Turkish confections.