You know how on Epicurious sometimes the readers choose a recipe, make substitutions for everything, and then give the recipe five stars? That is exactly what I did here. They were out of almond meal at the grocery store and I didn't have any whole almonds, so I made these with hazelnut flour and pecans... and they were really delicious. So I guess these should really be called Hazelnut-Pecan Macaroons, but my guess is that you could use the basic idea with mix-and-match flours and nuts and come out with a satisfactory product. The texture of the cookie was excellent! So light and chewy, and the toasted-ness of the tops of the nuts gave just the right counterpoint to the sweetness of the cookie. I served these with chocolate-olive oil mousse with the cookies half dunked in the mousse at our Passover Seder, and the overall effect was like eating a Nutella cookie. Even I, the Nutella non-enthusiast, enjoyed the combination.
Note: I tried really, really hard to make the proper calculation from whole nuts to meal amount, because I don't have a food processor to grind the nuts myself, and I couldn't find the right conversion factors. So I just faked it and used 1 5/8 cups of hazelnut flour instead of 2 cups of whole almonds, and not knowing any better, found the product satisfactory. I also rolled the cookies in turbinado sugar instead of regular white sugar, so good!
The recipe comes from "Dulce lo Vivas," by Ana Bensadón as referenced in the Passover section of the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/dining/283prex.html
Ingredients:
2 cups whole blanched almonds, plus about 30 almonds for decoration
1 cup granulated sugar (I put the whole cup into the cookies and used extra sugar for rolling)
1 large egg
Finely grated zest of 1 lemon
Directions:
1. Using a food processor equipped with a metal blade, grind 2 cups almonds very finely. Add 3/4 cup sugar, the egg and lemon zest, and pulse to make a cohesive dough. Transfer to a medium bowl, cover and refrigerate for at least 12 hours.
Note: I tried really, really hard to make the proper calculation from whole nuts to meal amount, because I don't have a food processor to grind the nuts myself, and I couldn't find the right conversion factors. So I just faked it and used 1 5/8 cups of hazelnut flour instead of 2 cups of whole almonds, and not knowing any better, found the product satisfactory. I also rolled the cookies in turbinado sugar instead of regular white sugar, so good!
The recipe comes from "Dulce lo Vivas," by Ana Bensadón as referenced in the Passover section of the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/dining/283prex.html
Ingredients:
2 cups whole blanched almonds, plus about 30 almonds for decoration
1 cup granulated sugar (I put the whole cup into the cookies and used extra sugar for rolling)
1 large egg
Finely grated zest of 1 lemon
Directions:
1. Using a food processor equipped with a metal blade, grind 2 cups almonds very finely. Add 3/4 cup sugar, the egg and lemon zest, and pulse to make a cohesive dough. Transfer to a medium bowl, cover and refrigerate for at least 12 hours.
2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick liner. Place remaining 1/4 cup sugar in a small bowl.
3. Pinching off pieces of dough about the size of a walnut, roll them first into balls, then into sugar. Gently press an almond point first into top of each cookie, so that half the almond can be seen. Arrange cookies one inch apart on baking sheet.
4. Bake until cookies have barest hint of color but still remain soft, 8 to 10 minutes. (Cookies must be soft when removed from oven to avoid excess hardening when they cool.) Cool completely, and store in an airtight container.
Yield: About 30 cookies. (I made my cookies a little bit bigger and got 23.)
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