Chocolate Alfajor Cookies – Base Recipe
The chocolate cookie halves for alfajores: butter, sugar, egg, flour and cocoa, nothing else. They are filled with dulce de leche.
The dough is brought together, not kneaded. Kneading develops gluten, and then the cookies come out hard instead of short: fold the dry ingredients in only until no flour is visible.
And they bake briefly. A 3 mm cookie is done at 180 °C in 8 to 10 minutes, and it still looks soft when you take it out: it firms up as it cools. Anyone who waits to see it brown has left it too long — with a chocolate dough you cannot see it coming.
🔎 What is dulce de leche? — where it comes from, what goes in it and how it differs.
Ingredients
- 75 g butter, at room temperature
- 75 g caster sugar
- 1 egg
- 220 g all-purpose flour (plain flour)
- 25 g cocoa powder
Method
- 1
Beat the butter with the sugar until creamy.
- 2
Add the egg and carry on beating until it is worked in.
- 3
Add the flour and the cocoa, and bring it together only until no flour is visible. Do not knead.
- 4
Cover with cling film and rest for 30 minutes in the fridge.
- 5
Roll the dough out to about 3 mm thick.
- 6
Cut out discs with a round cutter of 5-6 cm and lay them on a tray lined with baking paper.
- 7
Bake at 180 °C for 8 to 10 minutes. They look soft when you take them out and firm up as they cool. Let them cool completely before filling.