Alfajores

Until a year ago I had never even heard of alfajores - the soft shortbread-like South American cookie with a dulce de leche filling. These cookies which are hugely popular in Argentina and other South American countries have yet to made the roster of commonly homemade American cookies. Which honestly, is all the better. Be the first of your friends to try these easy to make (and easy to eat) cookies.

Making the cookies was no problem. I followed the NYT Cooking recipe and let the dough chill out in the fridge overnight (for no other reason than I didn't feel like baking a bunch of cookies late on a Friday night). The equal parts flour and cornstarch in the cookie dough produced a cloud-like cookie. The only adjustment I made was adding about a teaspoon of orange zest to the dough and eliminating the brandy (didn't have it in the house).

The dulce de leche was another story. I read several articles about different techniques to make the famed caramel spread. From what I gathered it seemed that it is just as typical to make it from scratch as it is to make it from cans of sweetened condensed milk.

I decided to try the sweetened condensed milk method, however, the image of boiling hot cans of caramel exploding in my kitchen rattled me. I managed to find an alternative. The idea is to basically replicate boiling cans of sweetened condensed milk, but in the oven and not in cans. This did not go as planned. Unfortunately, I did not pay close enough attention and let the water bath level get too low and as a result the top got overcooked to the point where there was this weird hard-ish layer. No matter, I scraped it off and then ran the rest of the dulce de leche through a sieve to get rid of any unintentional (for lack of a better word...) chunks.

I'm not sure if it's just because I've only had dulce de leche a handful of times but I was kind of startled by how mild the flavor was. I think I was expecting the rich sweetness of butterscotch but instead got a mild creamy caramel.

Assembling the cookies was a breeze. Just a big dollop of dulce de leche, a nonnegotiable and perhaps nontraditional sprinkle of salt before the top layer, and an optional roll in some shredded coconut.

These were probably the easiest sandwich cookies I've ever made. The cookie itself was sliced from a log of dough as opposed to rolling out and cutting the dough like in linzer cookies. The filling was mostly hands-off and, if you are mindful, an extremely easy process. What I thought would be too bland of a flavor in the dulce de leche turned out perfectly in the actual cookie. The sweetness was not cloying in the way that caramel might have been and was subtle enough to be able to enjoy more than one (or two or three) cookies in a sitting.

If you've never tried alfajores, give these recipes a go! Impress your friends and family with a cookie they've probably never heard of. And, as always, let me know how it turns out!