This week’s Cooking Eozea column will be going live about a week after I made the dish. I simply did not have the time to write it up any earlier than the Wednesday this week due to other traveling commitments. But that ultimately is fortuitous…
Because what this means is that while I am writing this week’s Cooking Eorzea column, FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2026 was announced! It will be held first in Anaheim, California between April 24 and 25, 2025, then in Berlin, Germany between July 25 and 26, 2026, and finally in Tokyo, Japan between October 31 and November 1, 2026! Hopefully there will be a new expansion announced along with new jobs (after all, last time we got Pictomancer and Viper), and an opportunity to peek behind the curtain to see what all goes into making this MMORPG as special as it is.
While we do not have any idea of what announcements are coming, I will say that if it is anything like when I attended and covered the last one in Las Vegas, then it will be a must-attend event for every Warrior of Light!
The one announcement that I want more than anything else? More non-instanced housing. Someday, I will win a housing lottery…
If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.
You can find out more news for the upcoming FINAL FANTASY XIV Fan Festival 2026 events as it goes live here.
Recipe of the Week
This is the 60th recipe in The FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook, and it comes out of the Norvrandt Region and it comes with a difficulty rating of Easy. It also is a dish that figures into post-Shadowbringers, and so it is something that is really special and one that I have been genuinely looking forward to making since I started Cooking Eorzea.
I have made cookies before, and I was really quite pleased that I could use the remaining eggs, unsalted butter, and beet sugar from last week for this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish. I don’t like having anything go to waste, after all. I don’t think it will be too hard to make these Coffee Biscuits as a result.
Anyway, here is what this famed dessert looks like in the hands of a professional chef:
Featured Ingredient of the Week
This week’s Cooking Eorzea featured ingredient is Espresso Powder! Espresso Powder comes from espresso beans that have already been used to make espresso coffee that were subsequently dried out and finely grounded. The odor is INCREDIBLY pungent in a good, coffee way, but there is definitely no way to mistake this ingredient for anything else.
To be honest, this really makes me think that this ingredient is one of those ingredients where ‘a little bit goes a long way’. This looks and smells like such an intense ingredient to work with, and it is something that I had never heard of until I was shopping for this week’s column.
Because of all that and the centrality of the ingredient to this week’s dish title, it was an easy selection for my Featured Ingredient of the Week!
My Cooking Attempt
There are a lot fewer ingredients for this week’s Cooking Eorzea recipe than there was last week:
First, I heated up a tablespoon of water in the microwave.
I then added in a tablespoon of the espresso powder before whisking it all together.
Setting it aside, I went to grab the butter that was allowed to get to room temperature. It was then that I realized that I only had half a cup of unsalted butter out, not a full cup. I had to get another stick out and wait an hour or so until it softened up to room temperature for me to use. At this point, I went ahead and tossed the espresso wet mixture out and remade it, too.
Anyway, here is what the butter looks like when I have two sticks at room temperature.
In a larger bowl (actually my mixer bowl!), I added together the all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, salt, and baking powder before mixing it by hand.
I added the two sticks of butter to a large bowl with the beet sugar and brown sugar. I then blended it all together until it was a smooth, wet mixture.
I added the eggs, the vanilla extract, and the espresso mixture into the wet bowl next.
I then started to add the flour mixture in slowly as I mixed it all together with a whisk. As more of the flour mixture became incorporated in, I would add in even more flour. It proved to get thicker and thicker of a dough as I kept working it together.
You can see through this progression of pictures as the dough gets thicker, and my whisk ultimately snapped at the base due to just how thick the dough was starting to get. I ended up having to finish mixing the dough together by hand.
Once the flour mixture was fully incorporated and it was blended together, I added in the chocolate chips. I got out a solid spatula and I used them to fold the chocolate chips into the dough and to make sure that they were quite evenly distributed throughout.
Laying out two sheets of parchment paper onto two baking sheets, I divided the dough up into around two-and-a-half tablespoon balls that I rolled up and placed down on the sheets. I had enough to ultimately make 18 biscuits.
I then flattened the balls gently with the palm of my hand to make them into thick discs before putting the baking sheets into the refrigerator for an hour to chill the dough down.
I then preheated the oven before the hour was up.
Once the hour was up, I moved the biscuits one at a time to a third baking sheet that was covered with more parchment paper. I then baked the coffee biscuits in the oven for 18 minutes at a time. Once a set was done, I would reload the baking sheet with more raw coffee biscuits and then cook them for another 18 minutes. This allowed the prior ones to cool down as well.
And here is how the finished Coffee Biscuits looked for this week’s Cooking Eorzea column! The FINAL FANTASY XIV Online: Shadowbringers coaster is from the Great Britian SHORYU 2019 pop-up, and the other coaster comes from Japan’s Eorzea Café.
The Coffee Biscuits, if you couldn’t tell from how the dough looked, were incredibly dense. This wasn’t a bad thing at all, but it definitely was noticeable. The espresso powder really cut through the dark chocolate chips in these biscuits while staying somewhat subtle, and they both blended together well into quite the amazing dish. I think the espresso powder is proof that one tablespoon of the right ingredients can go a long way as my first impressions about espresso powder were DEFINITELY correct. The biscuits were also perfectly baked through. I ended up not wanting to eat them all myself, and so I shared them with other people. Everyone I gave them to really loved my biscuits, and they remarked that the espresso flavor came through quite clearly too.
Afterword
If I was to do this Cooking Eorzea dish again, I would definitely bring ALL of the unsalted butter I need to room temperature before I start making the dish. I had to toss the espresso mixture out because I waited so long for the second butter stick to warm up. While it was thankfully just one tablespoon of espresso powder and one tablespoon of hot water, it was still unfortunate that I had to throw anything out. That was completely on me, however, and so the lesson I should take away from this is to be more careful with my ingredient prep.
Let’s dive into the thank you section! First up, I need to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook and including this wonderful dessert in the recipe list. I also need to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their cookbook. It is important for me to show how the dish looks in the hands of a professional versus how it looks when I make it. Next, I owe Brandon Rose a seriously major thank you for creating the logo for Cooking Eorzea. You should check him and his works out over on X.
Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game, and I cannot wait for the FINAL FANTASY XIV Fan Festival 2026 and all the wonderful news that will come out of it.
Next Time
This column will be going on a very short hiatus over Labor Day weekend, but it will be back right afterwards with another dessert dish from the Hingashi Region called Dango! This dish is made with matcha and two rice flours, and I am really excited to see how this turns out.
Please be sure to check it out!
What type of biscuits do you like?
Which FINAL FANTASY XIV Fan Festival 2026 location do you want to go to, and what would you like to see announced at this year’s event?
Let us know in the comments below!
