or, “Why I think someone’s South American grandma put a curse on my kitchen.”

Alfajores-ish cookies!

So, this year, I’ve decided to try to make traditional holiday foods. Except, I figured it would be more interesting to make other people’s traditional foods. For these, I asked Eunice, a Peruvian-Floridian-Blogger extrordinaire about Peruvian Christmas foods, and she suggested Alfajores.

According to Wikipedia, alfajores can be found all over the world in different forms, but in South America they are usually two cookies with a filling. After googling recipes, I found that two of the most common fillings are dulce de leche and manjar blanco. Either the words are used interchangeably (incorrectly) on the recipes I was looking at, or these are very similar milky-vanilla-sweet sauces/spreads. The biggest difference I found was the addition of baking soda in most of the dulce de leche recipes. If you know more about these, please let me know!

So, my version is compiled from a couple different sources, and when I served these to my classmates, a girl from Costa Rica said they tasted like alfajores from back home without me prompting her, so I think the flavors are close even if my methods are a little off.

I think this recipe looks deceptively easy, but proceed with caution. Or follow the directions better than I did.

Alfajores-ish Cookies

Cookie Ingredients

2 1/4 cups flour
3 Tbs powdered sugar
1 1/4 cup softened butter

Manjar blanco Ingredients

8 cups whole milk
2 Tbs vanilla extract
2 cups sugar

Disaster manjar blanco and disaster microwave dulce de leche.

Directions

1. Pour the milk into a  very large pot, way bigger than you think you need because, as you can see in the photo, the milk will jump out of the pot if it isn’t big enough.

2. When the milk boils, add sugar and vanilla and stir continuously making sure it doesn’t stick. Here is someone’s grandma’s method for doing this. It takes a very long time for the manjar blanco to thicken, as in, hours. I didn’t stir mine enough so it got a little burnt before getting smooth, thats why mine looks sugary instead of like caramel.

(I also attempted a microwave version of dulce de leche using just a can of sweetened condensed milk, which I am going to spare you. But I can tell you what not to do: Don’t use a too-small bowl, don’t take your eyes off the bowl, don’t cover with a paper towel, don’t cover with plastic wrap or else you will end up with a milky, brown, but delicious mess.)

3. Preheat oven to 350* and spray cookie sheet with non-stick spray.

4. Combine ingredients for cookie and knead into a ball. The dough is dry, so you can add tsp of oil or butter if it will not stick together.

5. Most recipes for alfajores recommend rolling the dough and using a cookie cutter, but my dough was too dry so I rolled small balls of dough and flattened them by hand. They were thicker than the traditional ones, but they held together for the most part.

6. Bake for 10-15 minutes depending on how thick your cookies are. (Don’t forget to keep stirring you manjar blanco!!)

7. Let the cookies cool, which should be no problem since the manjar blanco is probably still cooking, unless you burned it like I did. Once the manjar blanco comes together in paste-consistency rather than a liquid, take it off the heat.

8. Spread about a tablespoon of manjar blanco onto one cookie, and then add the other cookie. If your cookies are dry and breaking, just place a scoop of the manjar blanco on the cookie and then slowly press the other cookie down with the palm of your hand.

Some recipes recommended not adding the filling until just before serving, but my cookies were dry enough that it actually helped to fill them a few hours before serving. You can also cover these in powdered sugar.

The flavor was really good, despite my mess ups. I think if I were going to make these again, I would probably not try to be such an eager beaver, and just use a pre-made dulce de leche.

Do you have any suggestions for holiday foods I should try to make? Any special traditions from your area of the world/country/state?