To Toast the Walnuts:

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Spread walnuts on a baking sheet, and toast in the oven for 5 minutes.
3. When cooled, finely chop walnuts.

To Make the Cookies:

1. Turn the oven’s heat down to 325 degrees Fahrenheit
2. Cream lard and sugar in a mixer on medium speed until translucent and fluffy (~5-10 mins).
3. Add your vanilla. Continue creaming until vanilla is incorporated.
4. While everything is creaming, sift your flours, xantham gum, and salt together in a mixing bowl.
5. Whisk the flours until everything is equally mixed.
6. Add the chopped walnuts to the creamed lard, sugar, and vanilla.
7. Once the nuts are mixed in, begin adding your dry flour/salt mix 1/4 cup at a time until you have a recognizable dough. You should be able to pull a piece off between your thumb and forefinger and have it rest on your thumb, no sagging or moving of any kind.
8. Stop mixing once everything is evenly incorporated. If you have any flour left, keep it for rolling the dough out.
9. Dust your counter with flour (either some of the flour you had left or more oat flour), and roll out about 1/2 of your dough until it’s about 1/4-1/2″ thick.
10. Cut with whatever cookie cutter you like (Ideally one that is about 3″ in diameter, and doesn’t have too many sharp corners. Corners make for bigger issues trying to get the cookie out of the cutter unmangled).
11. Using a spatula, scrape the cookies off the counter and place them on an ungreased baking pan about 2 cm apart.
12. Lightly push chunks of your favourite chocolate in the centre of the cookies.
13. Re-shape the leftover dough on the counter, re-roll it, and cut more cookies, adding chocolate as you go.
14. At this point, folks usually run out of space in their oven or baking sheets, so I would recommend chilling the remaining 1/2 of the dough while the first batch bakes.
15. Bake the cut cookies for 15-20 minutes, until they have a faintly tanned rim on the outside.
16. Cool for ~5-10 mins.

To Make the Icing Sugar:

1. While the cookies are baking, place the sugar and the tbsp of arrowroot starch in a blender. I used a smoothie blender.
2. Blend for about 5 minutes, or until the sugar has lost much of its granular quality.

To Assemble the Cookies:

1. Once your icing sugar is made and your cookies have cooled, carefully scrape your cookies off the sheet, one by one, dipping them in the icing sugar on their way to the cookie tin. They may feel a bit crumbly now, but they will firm up in the tin.
2. Once a layer of cookies is finished, sprinkle some additional sugar over the cookies.
3. Place sheets of wax paper between each layer of cookies.

Finish your Baking:

1. Repeat the rolling, cutting, baking, cooling, and assembly steps with the remaining 1/2 of the dough, using whatever icing sugar remains.

Serve with chilled coconut milk!