These cookies are a recipe from Nick Malgieri, and contain very few ingredients; almond paste, sugar, and egg whites, with optional pine nuts to top them. I skipped the pine nuts and just went for the plain cookies. The texture and taste are both quite addictive - crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside, and very pure almond flavor. Yum - I will definitely consider making these again.
The finished cookies are flatter than I expected - I think of amaretti as little domes, rather than flat disks. As soon as I put these on the cookie sheet, they flattened right out. The dough more like a batter than a dough. I also did not have to cook them as long as the recipe said.The recipe suggests using almond paste in a can, since that has less sugar. I did get a can of "Almond Filling", but it looks like it has some other odd ingredients that may not enhance these cookies - coconut (?!) and a preservative. I also had the almond paste in a tube, so I used that instead of the can, and will save the can for a future experiment.
The cookies stuck to the parchment, and as I was too lazy (!) to do the suggested trick of setting the parchment on a wet cloth in order to soften them up, I just used a thin meta spatula to get them off as well as I could. The bottoms of the cookies weren't completely intact (damage hidden in the photo above! :-) but that didn't affect the taste!
They are dangerously addictive!
ReplyDeleteIf you can't see it, it isn't there :-)
ReplyDeleteThese were addictive, weren't they?