I generally try to avoid the hassle of making roll and cut cookies, but when I had some leftover apricot levkar (after baking some hamantaschen) and a snow day off from work, I decided to tackle Rose Levy Beranbaum's recipe for "The Ischler." Beranbaum says this cookie "ranks as one of the finest of all time" and
is traditionally made by sandwiching fragile almond cookies with levkar
and dipping them halfway into melted chocolate. Her modern adaptation is simplified; you skip the dipping step and just fill the cookies with both chocolate ganache and levkar.
You can make the dough in a stand mixer or a food processor; when given this choice, I always pick the food processor. The dough includes powdered sugar, almonds, cool butter, egg, vanilla, flour, and salt. The recipe says that the resulting mixture will be moist and crumbly and that you will need to press it together and knead it until smooth -- but my dough was soft and creamy and it was pretty much impossible to knead. I just scraped it into a ball, flattened it into a disk, and put it into the refrigerator to firm up.
After the dough was chilled, I rolled it out and cut it into fluted circles. I baked the cookies for 10 minutes and they turned out lightly golden; I was also able to gather and re-roll the dough scraps without any problems.
When the cookies are cool, you fill them with apricot levkar and "Super Firm Chocolate Ganache Filling" (a half pound of chocolate and two ounces of cream). The ganache hid most of the apricot filling, but I thought these cookies looked great. As for the taste -- I was not impressed. I think that chocolate ganache has a tendency to drown out a lot of other flavors and I found that to be the case here -- it was difficult to tell that this was an almond cookie. And while flavor of the apricot levkar came though, it was secondary to the chocolate.
My biggest complaint was that the cookies became soft by the next day. I stored them at room temperature as specified, and I wonder if they would have held up better if I had kept them refrigerated. I suppose I also could have kept the cookies in the oven a minute or two longer to make them crisper at the outset. In any case, the soft texture was not appealing to me. If I make these cookies again, I think I would just skip the chocolate altogether to focus on the pairing of almonds and apricot.
Recipe: "The Ischler" from The Baking Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum, recipe available here on epicurious.com.
Previous Post: "Cookies Beyond My Sweetest Dreams: Hamantaschen," March 11, 2014.
You can make the dough in a stand mixer or a food processor; when given this choice, I always pick the food processor. The dough includes powdered sugar, almonds, cool butter, egg, vanilla, flour, and salt. The recipe says that the resulting mixture will be moist and crumbly and that you will need to press it together and knead it until smooth -- but my dough was soft and creamy and it was pretty much impossible to knead. I just scraped it into a ball, flattened it into a disk, and put it into the refrigerator to firm up.
After the dough was chilled, I rolled it out and cut it into fluted circles. I baked the cookies for 10 minutes and they turned out lightly golden; I was also able to gather and re-roll the dough scraps without any problems.
My biggest complaint was that the cookies became soft by the next day. I stored them at room temperature as specified, and I wonder if they would have held up better if I had kept them refrigerated. I suppose I also could have kept the cookies in the oven a minute or two longer to make them crisper at the outset. In any case, the soft texture was not appealing to me. If I make these cookies again, I think I would just skip the chocolate altogether to focus on the pairing of almonds and apricot.
Recipe: "The Ischler" from The Baking Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum, recipe available here on epicurious.com.
Previous Post: "Cookies Beyond My Sweetest Dreams: Hamantaschen," March 11, 2014.
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