A few weeks ago, Tom handed me his iPad to show me that his epicurious app was open and displaying a recipe for Chewy Almond-Raspberry Sandwich Cookies. Tom claims that he just opened the app and it went right to that recipe; neither of us can figure out why it would have done that, but perhaps the baking gods just work in mysterious ways. The recipe included a photo and it looked like it was right up my alley, being the almondphile that I am. Unfortunately, I didn't have any almond paste in the house, so I had to wait until I could go out and buy some before I could try the recipe.
This recipe only requires six ingredients: sliced almonds, almond paste, sugar, cinnamon, egg whites, and raspberry jam (I skipped the step of sprinkling powdered sugar over the cookies at the end, or it would require seven). All you have to do to make the batter is grind the almond paste with the sugar and cinnamon in the food processor and add the egg whites. While the recipe instructs you to put the batter in a pastry bag and pipe out strips, I didn't want to deal with variability of piped cookies, because I wanted all my cookies to be of uniform shape and size to make neat-looking sandwiches. So I used a #50 scoop to form cookies that were perfectly round and consistently sized (ending up with 20 cookies that were 2.5 inches in diameter after baking). I dropped the scoops of dough onto a layer of sliced almonds and then coated the top of the cookies with almonds as well, before transferring the cookies to a parchment-lined sheet for baking. In the oven, the cookies puffed up quite a bit, but after cooling, they flattened out to become nice and even.
These cookies were quite delicious -- full of rich almond flavor and covered with crisp almonds all around. The middles of the cookies were wonderfully chewy. I thought that the cookies bordered on being too sweet by themselves and were better when sandwiched around some raspberry jam, which provided a bit of tartness to offset the sweetness. However, the cookies were so good plain that I am still craving one now just thinking about them.
Recipe: "Chewy Almond-Raspberry Sandwich Cookies" from epicurious.com.
This recipe only requires six ingredients: sliced almonds, almond paste, sugar, cinnamon, egg whites, and raspberry jam (I skipped the step of sprinkling powdered sugar over the cookies at the end, or it would require seven). All you have to do to make the batter is grind the almond paste with the sugar and cinnamon in the food processor and add the egg whites. While the recipe instructs you to put the batter in a pastry bag and pipe out strips, I didn't want to deal with variability of piped cookies, because I wanted all my cookies to be of uniform shape and size to make neat-looking sandwiches. So I used a #50 scoop to form cookies that were perfectly round and consistently sized (ending up with 20 cookies that were 2.5 inches in diameter after baking). I dropped the scoops of dough onto a layer of sliced almonds and then coated the top of the cookies with almonds as well, before transferring the cookies to a parchment-lined sheet for baking. In the oven, the cookies puffed up quite a bit, but after cooling, they flattened out to become nice and even.
Recipe: "Chewy Almond-Raspberry Sandwich Cookies" from epicurious.com.
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