This is me totally cheating, because I didn’t lift a finger to make these! Let’s say I delegated a little…

These alfajores are sweet and crumbly, and filled with tooth-shattering dulce de leche. Also, they are great with Scotch.

This partly started when a friend posted a link to the recipe on Facebook. I thought ‘hey, I have a ginormous jar of dulce de leche in my fridge’ and sent the link to J with the note “Dude, you’re totally making these for me!”. At the time, we still had quite a few farmers’ market butter tarts left, so we decided to wait to make the alfajores until we were out of butter tarts.

Fast forward many months, to J mentioning the crazy jar of dulce de leche in the fridge… it was time.

Let’s get serious for a moment. I’m terrible at baking. I try – really, I do! Every time I try to bake something sweet, something goes wrong. J, on the other hand, is great at it. He makes pizza dough, artisan breads, loaves… he’s a dough whisperer or something. So yeah, I left the alfajores in the hands of someone I thought could pull it off.

I’m a smart girl.

The Verdict:

The alfajores were amazing! They were incredibly messy to eat – very, very crumbly. So incredible. Is there really much more I need to say about it?

Argentinian Alfajores de Maizena

Based on this recipe.

10 completed “sandwiches”

Ingredients:

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cups corn starch
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 pound butter (1 stick), room temperature
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 egg yolks
• 1 teaspoon whisky
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1-2 teaspoons grated lemon zest (we used dried lemon zest powder – it worked great!)
• 1 cup (approximately) Dulce de Leche

Preparation:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Sift all the dry ingredients together.
3. Cream the butter with the sugar by whipping together with a wisk. Add the egg yolks, the vanilla extract, the whisky and the lemon zest.
4. Make a well in the middle of the sifted dry ingredients, and fill with the wet mixture. Carefully integrate the wet mixture into the dry, making a crumbly dough. Be sure not to overwork the dough.
5. Once you have a rough dough, make a ball by pressing the different pieces together with your hands.
6. Cover it with plastic wrap and refrigerate it for 30-60 minutes.
7. Flour the counter to prevent the dough from sticking. Roll the dough out to 1/2 centimeter thickness. Use a round cookie cutter (we used a 2″ diameter), and cut out as many rounds as you can. Roll the scraps together and repeat until you have used all of the dough.
8. Place rounds on a cookie sheet and bake for about 15 minutes. Check after 10 minutes, and ensure they don’t turn golden. The colour should remain white.
9. Place cookies on a cooling rack.
10. Once cooled, create the “sandwiches” by carefully adding a dollop of dulce de leche (roughly a teaspoon full) and placing another cookie on top. Press the top cookie gently to spread out the dulce de leche.