Homemade Alfajores!

A couple weeks ago, I made dulce de leche, commonly known as caramel sauce. It was delicious, totally blogworthy. But the reason why I made it in the first place was to use it as filling for alfajores. 

What are alfajores? An alfajore is a shortbread cookie of Spanish origin with a caramel filling. It's popular in some South American countries, particularly in Argentina and Ecuador, and I have had the pleasure to try one for my very first time a few years ago. Upon first bite, I have been intrigued. It is sometimes served dipped in chocolate or coated with a rim of coconut flakes. Since it is already a dense cookie (two thick shortbreads held together with a seam of caramel), I wanted to keep it simple so I stuck with the basics. I found a great recipe online that uses a food processor. The food processor turned out to be brilliant in that it keeps the texture and density of the dough very tight, therefore perfect for later rolling it out to cut into shapes. Here is the recipe that I used: Alfajores by Stella Parks 

Since I made the dulce de leche in the Instant Pot already, I just had to prepare the cookies. This was the first time I worked with vanilla bean. I scraped the beans out from a single vanilla pod before blending into the dough. They look like a small mass of little dark particles--almost resembling specks of black pepper but finer, so not quite.

Look at that vanilla bean in the dough.

It was a fun yet messy process to sandwich these!

In the end, I had some nice alfajores cookies served with a jar of dulce de leche to supplement the filling. Some technical issues I encountered was that I warmed the dulce de leche too much, so the filling ran a bit. Also, some of the shortbread cookies were uneven when paired together--I overlooked this while rolling out the dough. However, after chilling them in close rows inside the refrigerator, they kept their shape.

I would definitely make these cookies again, as they would be great to take to a party. They also keep well for several days if refrigerated.