Alfajores are two small, light golden butter cookies sandwiched with dulce de leche and dusted with icing sugar. This is the cornstarch kind, often called alfajores de maicena, with a spoonful of cognac and a little vanilla in the dough. Move over, Oreo.
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Recipe
Alfajores
Ingredients
Ingredients – there will be somewhere between 12-20 pieces depending on the thickness
Method
- Bring the butter and the sugar into a bowl and stir. With an electric mixer on low speed, beat the mixture until soft dough forms – stop occasionally and scrape the sides of the bowl.
- While the mixer is on – mix the corn starch, wheat flour, baking powder, baking soda and fine salt all together on a separate bowl.
- Add the egg yolks, cognac and vanilla extracts to the butter and sugar combination and mix well.
- Add the flour mixture slightly on to it and stir until no lumps of flour remain.
- Lay the dough flat on a piece of plastic wrap, pack it in and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
- Turn on the oven. Set the temperature at 175 ° C.
- Place the dough on a floured surface of the table, sprinkle flour on top of the dough and roll it out in about ½ cm thickness.
- Cut the dough into 5 cm rounds and place them on the baking sheets lined with baking paper with approximately a thumb width intervals.
- Roll out the dough again, punch out, etc. until all dough is used.
- Bake the cakes in the oven for 12-14 minutes until they are light golden – if your cakes are thinner than ½ cm, reduce the baking time.
- Allow the cakes to cool completely. Add approximately 2 tsp. of dulce de leche and sandwich it in between two cakes.
- Sprinkle with icing sugar.
Step by step, in pictures
The recipe card above, in six stages, from creaming the butter to the final dusting of sugar.
Cream the butter and sugar- Mix the dry ingredients
- Beat in the yolks, cognac and vanilla
- Wrap the dough and chill it
- Cut 5 cm rounds and bake
- Fill, sandwich and dust
What an alfajor is, and where it comes from
An alfajor is a sandwich cookie: two round biscuits held together by a sweet filling, most often dulce de leche. English-language recipes usually call them dulce de leche sandwich cookies. The name is older than the cookie – Wikipedia traces “alfajor” to Arabic by way of Andalusian Spanish.
Are alfajores Peruvian or Argentinian?
Both. The sandwich cookie is the form South America made its own, and Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, Chile and several other countries all have versions. Wikipedia describes the Argentine alfajor as two round biscuits of wheat flour or corn flour joined with dulce de leche, sometimes coated in chocolate, and cites a 2021 figure of six million eaten in Argentina every day. In Peru the filling is called manjar blanco.
What are Spanish alfajores?
A different sweet with the same name. In Spain an alfajor is a confection of honey, almonds, flour and spices rather than a filled cookie. The version from Medina-Sidonia in Andalusia has held protected geographical indication status since 2004.
Three things that make or break them
- Sort out the dulce de leche first. Homemade dulce de leche takes about four hours and has to cool before it can be spread, so start it well ahead – or skip the wait with a ready-made jar.
- Go easy on the filling. The cookies have a light, delicate flavour, and too much dulce de leche drowns it. About two teaspoons per pair is enough.
- Thickness decides the yield. Rolled at about ½ cm the dough gives 12 to 20 pieces. Roll it thinner and you get more, but they bake faster, so check the oven early.
Quick answers about alfajores
Are alfajores like macarons?
They look alike but are made differently. Both are filled sandwich cookies, but a macaron shell is made from almond flour and egg white, while these cookies are a butter dough of cornstarch, wheat flour and egg yolks.
What does an alfajor taste like?
Sweet and caramel-like from the dulce de leche, around a delicate, buttery cookie. This version also has a little cognac and vanilla in the dough.
