Alfajores

Here's another new cookie I wanted to try. Alfajores (pronounced alfa-hor-ays). They are shortbread cookies sandwiched with dulce de leche. 

I started by making the cookie dough and chilling it. Then I started making the dulce de leche. It was a long process, but fun to watch the milk go through its various stages before becoming a thick sticky caramel-like substance. Here's some photos of the process and finished product.

It started out as a quart of whole milk, with some light corn syrup, sugar, baking soda, salt, and vanilla. After about an hour and a half, and a lot of stirring, it became about a cup of dulce de leche. A lot of people use a shortcut and make it by using sweetened condensed milk, but I wanted to make it from scratch. 

Here it is when it came off the stove. The next day, once it had cooled, it was very thick and sticky. YUM!

Here are the shortbread cookies.

And here is the finished product.

These are delicious and definitely worth making again. 

Chocolate Orange Hazelnut Checkerboard Cookies

I found a recipe for these online and they looked good, but time consuming. I figured I'd give them a try. They were good, but not SO good that all the effort required to make them would warrant making them again. 

The first thing I did was zest an orange using one of my favorite kitchen tools, the Microplane...(it works GREAT!)

Next, I made the dough by first making a plain shortbread cookie dough. Then I divided it in half and added chocolate to half of it. Then I added orange zest and toasted hazelnuts. Next, I rolled them out flat and chilled them. I also reserved a small portion of chocolate dough to use for wrapping the outside of the loaf.

After rolling and chilling, I placed the two pieces on top of each other, cut them into strips, and then alternated  the pieces to achieve the checkerboard look. Here they are before going into the oven. The pattern is far from perfect, but it works. It's VERY hard to get the pieces perfectly symmetrical. 

And here is the finished product. You can see the flecks of orange zest and toasted hazelnuts. They were certainly delicious, but I don't know if I'll go through all the effort to make them again.