“Chivalry is a poor substitute for justice, if one cannot have both. Chivalry is something like the icing on cake, sweet, but not nourishing.”
– Nellie McClung, Canadian feminist
Alfajores come in a wide variety of styles, mostly regional, though some, like my last post, are more related to method. Over time I may just come up with some sort of reasonably comprehensive exploration of the genre, but for now, I’m just going to move on to the next one that I needed to practice for our first pastry exam – santafecinos, the style associated with the province of Santa Fé here.
Again, this is a “by hand” demo since that’s what we needed to do in class, though I’d do these in a mixer for myself in the future. Here, mix together 250 grams of cake/pastry flour, a large pinch of salt (2-3 grams), 30 grams of egg yolks (roughly 2), and 80 grams of butter. Note, by the way, there’s no sugar in these, that’s not a mistake.
Work it all together until it’s all more or less well distributed, but not smooth. Then add in 60-65 cc of water, enough to bring it together and make a smooth dough. Here you knead it for a couple of minutes until it’s a nice, soft, homogeneous dough.
And here’s the way the dough should look. Refrigerate if for about 15-20 minutes to re-firm up the butter.
Roll it out pretty thin – 2 mm – this is actually just a touch too thick as it turned out.
Cut small, 6 cm, rounds out and lay them on a baking sheet and bake at 180°C/350°F until they are just cooked – you don’t actually want them to brown, which mine did because they were too thick and the surface colored before they were cooked through. You want a slightly crisp, but still pale, cookie.
Let them cool and then pipe a small amount of dulce de leche onto 2/3 of them.
Stack them up three high. Lightly press them down – the dulce de leche should not reach to the edges, but stay like this.
Put on a non-stick surface, preferably something easy to clean up like a big sheet of wax/parchment paper. Drizzle them with vanilla glaze – 250 gm powdered sugar, 1 egg white and a couple of drops of vanilla, all mixed together to make a thick but pourable glaze.
And, let them sit for about an hour for the glaze to dry and harden. Serve ’em up!
And, just in case you were wondering how the first pastry exam went… a picture speaks a thousand words, or a couple hundred masas finas….
