Alfajores — TBLSPOON

Jan 17

Jan 17 Alfajores

Delicate, buttery cornstarch cookies filled with dulce de leche, Alfajores are popular in many Latin American countries. I first tried them after I moved to Southern California, where we are blessed with bakeries from all over the world. In the suburbs of Maryland where I grew up this was not the case though I suspect that’s changed by now. Anyway, I think they are absolutely delicious and addictive. I love the hints of lemon and salt in the cookie and the way both flavors balance the dulce de leche.

How I Made Them

I followed a recipe by Melissa Clark found on NYT Cooking. The cookie making was simple and straightforward. I like that the instructions were for slice and bake rather than roll out dough. I didn't have the brandy called for, so I used bourbon with a hint of granulated sugar dissolved in it instead.

The recipe includes a method for making dulce de leche. I had a lot of left over dulce de leche from the Tahini Thumbprint cookies that I made at Christmas time and these guys were an excellent way to use it up. And don't tell anyone but I used store bought Rex Dulce de Leche. Generally I'm all about everything being homemade but this saved me hours. And it was fabulous.

What else, the recipe says to pipe the dulce de leche onto the cookies. This probably yields picture perfect results, but I wasn't excited about the idea of cleaning the sticky filling out of my reusable piping bag, so I used a small cookie scoop about 2/3 filled to portion it out. It was fast and worked pretty well.

As you can see, I only rolled half of them in the coconut at the end. I like coconut but I think the flavor gets lost so it wasn't worth wasting the coconut on these. I hope that's not Alfajores blasphemy!