I don't remember how I happened to come across this recipe for "Roasty Toasty Pean-Caramel Shortbread Cookies" from Bon Appetit, but it immediately appealed to me. There are only a handful of ingredients; you can make the dough in the food processor; and they're slice-and-bake cookies, so no rolling is required. It seemed like it would be a cinch.
I ran into a few problems. First, I figured that as long as I was opening up a can of dulce de leche, I might as well multiply the recipe by three to use up most of the can. That would be have fine, except that I got greedy and tried to mix all of the dough at once in my food processor. To make the dough, you toast nuts; grind them until fine; add flour, sugar, and kosher salt; pulse in chilled cubed butter; and incorporate dulce de leche. Because I crammed so much into my food processor, I had a lot of trouble getting the ingredients evenly incorporated. What made it worse is that my mixture was so loose it looked like American buttercream. I did the best I could, but ended up with a pile of soft batter that was a nightmare to handle.
I struggled to shape it into a log. I even tried chilling the dough for a while first. But I still ended up with batter that was the consistency of frosting. I scraped and shaped and pushed until I got the best log I could manage. I figured the dough needed as much time as possible to firm up, so I left it in the fridge for a day. Even then, it never became totally firm.
The cookies spread and flattened a fair amount in the oven and the edges of the cookies did not retain their sharp angles. Instead, the edges were thin and rounded. The cookies were dark golden, although the raw dough was already a light tan color before baking from the dulce de leche. I liked these cookies. They were light and practically melted in my mouth, and the dulce de leche flavor was unmistakeable, with a nice toastiness from the pecans. I'm glad I used demerara sugar for the coating, because it added a nice crunch and reinforced the caramel flavor of the cookie.
All this said, I didn't think these cookies were worth the hassle. I like making slice-and-bake cookies for their ease of preparation, and the process of making these cookies was pretty frustrating. I suppose you could always add more flour to make the dough easier to handle, but that would probably compromise the tender texture of the resulting cookie. Or perhaps it would work as a drop cookie. I don't feel compelled to revisit the recipe to find out.
Recipe: "Roasty Toasty Pecan-Caramel Shortbread Cookies" by Molly Baz, from Bon Appetit.
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