I headed to the kitchen with my can of dulce de leche, and armed with this recipe for alfajores. Alfajores are sandwich cookies – sweet dulce de leche acts as the glue to hold together buttery, shortbread-like cookies. I’ve only recently become familiar with them, but it’s my understanding that they’re a very popular treat in South America. I’m not generally a fan of roll-out cookies because, frankly, they’re more work than drop cookies, but these were actually really easy. The dough rolls out beautifully – mine wasn’t sticky, nor did it warm up enough to give me any trouble. I used a fluted cookie cutter to make the cookies a little more special, but you could really make these in any shape you want.
By Tracey
Dulce de Leche Sandwich Cookies (Alfajores)
Ingredients:
- 4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar
- 1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into small cubes
- 1/2 cup water
- sanding sugar
- dulce de leche
Directions:
Sift the flour and confectioners’ sugar onto a sheet of wax paper. Transfer to the bowl of your food processor along with the butter, and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse meal, about 20 seconds. With the machine running, add the water through the feed tube in a slow, steady stream, and continue processing just until the dough comes together, about 20 seconds. Transfer the dough to a work surface and divide in half. Shape each half into a thin disk and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for an hour.
Preheat oven to 350 F. Line two baking sheets with parchment.
Unwrap one disk of dough and place it on a floured work surface. Roll the dough to a thickness of 1/4 to 1/8-inch. Use a 1 3/4-inch cookie cutter to cut as many rounds as you can from the dough then transfer them to the prepared baking sheet (they won’t spread, you can put them fairly close together). Set aside the scraps. Repeat with the second disk of dough. Combine the scraps from both disks to reroll and cut additional cookies. Sprinkle half of the cookies with sanding sugar. Bake for 15 minutes, or until pale golden brown (rotating the baking sheets halfway through the baking time). Transfer the baking sheets to wire racks and let the cookies cool for a few minutes before removing them to the racks to cool completely.
Match the cookies in pairs by size, combining one sugared cookie and one unsugared. Place about 1 teaspoon of dulce de leche on the unsugared cookie, then put the sugared cookie on top, pressing gently to sandwich and squeeze the filling to the edges. Repeat to finish all of the sandwiches. Store in an airtight container at room temperature.
Makes about 3 dozen sandwich cookies.
