Cooking up the good life

It has been cold here.  Bone chilling cold.  Not the below zero kind of cold that we are used to in Minnesota, but a kind of cold that gets inside you quickly, and is hard to get out.  And, while the pizza, pasta and meat have not been warming my heart, the other specialty in this town is chocolate.  As I mentioned, there is a strong Italian presence here, so lovely, delicate pastries abound.  And there are the Alfajores. 

Traditional Afajores

These cookies apparently have their origins in Arab lands, and are traditionally made with honey, almonds and cinnamon…today they are found mostly in Argentina and surrounding countries, and have evolved to the heavenly combination of dulce de leche sandwiched between two butter cookies and smothered with chocolate glaze.  For those of you unfamiliar, dulce de leche, a common treat in Latin America, is essentially a caramel made from milk and sugar. Needless to say, a gal could spend a lot of money, and potentially gain some pounds sampling every version of Alfajores out there!  Not to mention that there likely isn’t a ‘whole foods’ version of the treat to be found in this town!

Since there are many low quality versions,  I have held off on buying dulce de leche, and thought I’d wait to make some of my own.  Then, at the Mercado Central in my favorite cured meat and cheese shop, I spotted a jar of ‘dulce de leche de cabra’-that would be an artisan version of the sweet stuff, made with goat’s milk!  I took it home, and yesterday instead of venturing out into the cold, I stayed in and spent the afternoon creating my own version of Alfajores.

As many of you know, I like to bake with healthy, whole ingredients.  So, I thought I’d go with a simple shortbread cookie made with honey, brown sugar and a mix of white and whole wheat flour, and bittersweet chocolate with real butter.

I adapted my favorite shortbread recipe.  It is incredibly simple and delicious and includes just three ingredients:

1# butter, 1 cup sugar, 5 cups flour

I have already converted this recipe by substituting maple syrup-my favorite sweetener of all time, but there is no maple to be found in South America.  I decided to use half honey and half brown sugar, and to make a small batch.  I was also converting cups to grams without any formal measuring utensils (something I haven’t added to the kitchen yet).  So here is what I used:

80 grams softened butter (about 3 oz.),

2 Tbs honey, 2 Tbs brown sugar,

125 milliliters white flour,

125 milliliters whole wheat flour (about 2/3 cup each)

creaming the butter, sugar and honey

Once this is creamed, you add the flour and mix until it forms a good firm, yet pliable dough

When the dough is firm, you roll it into a smooth ‘log’ being gentle enough not to flatten it, yet firm enough to keep out any air holes.  Then you want to slice the dough into nice uniform cookies.  Normally, for shortbread, I’d cut them about 1/2 inch thick, but since I was making a sandwich with these, I cut them much thinner-about 1/4 inch thick.  A serrated knife works well for this.They were fragile, but firm enough.

While the cookies baked-about 18 minutes at 375 (my oven has no numbers on it, so I was guessing at the temp), I made the chocolate glaze.  I have found a lovely chocolate company called Aguila. For a pretty reasonable price (about $2 per 6 oz bar) I have a nice quality semi sweet bar that melts creamy and rich.  I melted about 40 grams of butter (about 1 1/2 oz.) with about 4 oz. chocolate.

perfectly browned cookies, freshly melted chocolate

Now I was ready for the assembly.  This was somewhat laborious but fun nonetheless.

bottom halves with dulce de leche

now for the chocolate!

like frosting little cakes

Notice the makeshift tray-I covered a cutting board with plastic and taped it down so it wouldn’t move.  I also remembered to glaze the bottoms of the cookies first. After they were all covered, I stuck them in the freezer to solidify.

Here they are.

Not bad for my first attempt!  A couple of happy chocolate faces too!