Tilhitas cookies are a family recipe with a strong ambition to conquer both the region and the national markets.
Three of the family members had an idea: taking a family recipe hundreds of years old and turning it into a gourmet product. We’re talking about Tilhitas cookies, and the name comes as a tribute to the original recipe baker, Tili, the grandmother.
When looking back at her childhood, Sara Jardim remembers the image of “the trays coming out of the oven as well as the baker’s screams”, in other words, her mother telling everyone off, “because all the cookies would disappear as soon as they’d come out of the oven, and it would be the helpers’ fault, but not really, the cookies were to blame for being that good.”
That memory started the idea of baking and selling the “little, fine, crispy” oatmeal cookies, relying on the sugar cane honey to give them that extra flavour.
Their aim is to make this product “a benchmark in Madeira’s traditional confectionery, to the standards of the honey cake or the honey breads. We want these cookies to be so present in Madeira’s everyday life that they become a part of the Island’s identity”.
Right now the cookies are being sold only regionally, in a few stores and through online ordering, but Sara Jardim says that this product will be expanding to the rest of the country as well as other European markets next year.
