Alfajores cookies are effectively melt in the mouth lemon flavoured cookies wedged between a band of dulce de leche and rolled in coconut! If that isn’t something to get your tastebuds excited, I don’t know what is! The cookies alone are incredible and I feel you can get away with omitting the brandy if you wish, but they were genuinely incredible! I hope you give them a go!
How to make Alfajores cookies
First up grab a mixing bowl and with an electric whisk beat together the sugar and butter until creamed, don’t just whizz it together until merged, blend it that little bit extra, so a good 5 minutes to make it nice and creamy in texture.
Now add in the egg and eggstra (yep, sorry for the pun) yolks, vanilla, lemon zest and alcohol (if using). Whizz this together for a minute or so until combined. Now add in the flour, cornflour, salt and baking powder and mix together. It will form after a few minutes a slightly tacky dough that you should be able to handle and shape, it won’t be sticky, more slightly tacky, if it is too wet, add a little extra flour and mix through until you have a dough you can shape.
Line cling film on your work surface and put the dough onto it, with another piece of cling film on top. Press down into a disc to flatten out about an inch thick, then place in the fridge to chill for at least 45 minutes.
Scatter some more flour down on your work surface and roll out the chilled dough to about a third of an inch in thickness. Keeping the surface well dusted, using cookie cutters, cut into circles, I used 4 inch ones, but you can use whatever size you like. Place cut dough onto a lined baking tray and repeat / re-use and cut the dough until you’ve used it all up.
You can bake it straight away if you like but I decided to pre-heat my oven once they were all cut and place the biscuits in the fridge whilst the oven warmed up. Pre-heat the oven to 150fan/170c or alternative and bake the cookies for 10 minutes or until one or two just start to lightly brown on the edges, you want to keep them that nice pale colour for them to pop. They will be delicate so remove and allow them to cool on their trays.
Once cooled, sandwich two biscuits together spreading a few tsp of dulce de leche on the flat side of the biscuits and wedging together by pressing gently. Then roll in the coconut, putting the coconut in a shallow dish helps, just roll it like a wheel so the coconut sticks to the dulce de leche filling all the way around. Eat on the same day or store in an air tight container! I hope you enjoy these as much as I did!