A Mexican Wedding Cookie-Alfajor Hybrid: Alfajores de Nuez

As I continued to try recipes from the Los Angeles Times' 2020 collection of holiday cookie recipes, I decided to try Arturo Enciso and Ana Belén Santino's recipe for Alfajores de Nuez. Arturo and Ana own Gusto Bread in Long Beach, and the recipe is a hybrid of an Argentinean alfajor and a Mexican polvorón (a Mexican wedding cookie). 

 

I've made other alfajor recipes where you need to roll and cut the cookies, but these are drop cookies so they are a lot less hassle. To make the dough, you mix softened butter with powdered sugar, salt, and vanilla; add in ground walnuts and flour; and beat until light and fluffy. You portion out the dough (I used a #60 scoop and got 65 individual cookies per batch) and flatten the cookies before baking. The downside to these being drop cookies is that they were not uniformly sized after baking -- but it wasn't too difficult to pair up similarly-sized cookies to form sandwiches.

Instead of making my own dulce de leche, I used store bought La Lechera to fill the cookies. When I make sandwich cookies, I often use a scoop to add a dollop of filling to the underside of one cookie, put the second cookie on top, and squish the two cookies together until the filling reaches the edges. I tried that here and I ended up with broken cookies. They cookies were so fragile that they could not withstand the pressure required to distribute the dulce de leche. 

 

I came up with a plan B. I put the dulce de leche into a piping bag, piped on a circle of filling that went all the way to the edge of one cookie, and gently placed another cookie on top of form the sandwich. I still broke a few cookies just picking them up -- I don't know that I've ever worked with a cookie this fragile. I was so worried about breaking more cookies that instead of rolling the filled sandwiches in desiccated coconut, I carefully spooned coconut over the exposed edge of the filling as I gingerly rotated the cookies to ensure I got coverage all the way around. 

 

But the crumbly cookie was a freakin' delicious cookie. I know alfajores are supposed to be crumbly, but these cookies had the exact texture of a Mexican wedding cookie and they seemed to practically dissolve in your mouth. They were amazing. And, of course, the dulce de leche and coconut were fantastic. I think it's such a genius idea to essentially turn a polvorón into a alfajor -- you might not get the tidy, angular appearance of a rolled and cut cookie, but the texture is incomparable. This cookie is a home run.

 

Recipe: "Alfajor de Nuez" from Arturo Enciso and Ana Belén Santino, from the Los Angeles Times.