{12} Pignoli

We’ve made it to the end of another instalment of the 12 Days of Baking! This cycle has gone on a little longer than I planned and well into the New Year, but I’d rather that than pile on the stress of trying to do everything by Christmas Eve. Also, spreading things out gives friends and family a sporting chance of being able to enjoy what I bake, rather than turning it into an endurance event whereby cookies need to be eaten as fast as they are made…

To bring things to a conclusion, we’re finishing with a classic Italian cookie: pignoli.

These morsels are delicious almond cookies, crisp and lightly golden on the outside and with a soft and chewy centre. They are generously coated in pine nuts which toast lightly in the oven. They are simultaneously simple and luxurious. I love their festive appearance which will look good on any cookie tray, but they are equally at home any time of the year with a cup of good coffee for a quiet moment of reflection.

Pignoli originate from the island of Sicily in Southern Italy, where both almonds and pine nuts feature in local cookies. They’ve also made their way to the US, where there are also a favourite in Italian-American families at Christmas.

While my festive baking this year has included some complex bakes, pignoli are (comparatively) easy. One bowl, no resting, no chilling, just roll, coat in nuts and bake. And this is a delightful recipe as it gives you a lot of deliciousness for minimal effort.

When it comes to pignoli recipes, many are based on almond paste, which is mixed with sugar and egg whites. Almond paste is a 50/50 mixture of almonds and sugar, and not the same thing as marzipan here in Britain (marzipan here is typically 25/75 almonds to sugar). However, almond paste is not an ingredient that is easily available in stores here, so I’ve come up with an easy recipe that just uses ground almonds and sugar. It gets us to the same place, and I think it is easier – there is no need to break down a lump of almond paste into a smooth mixture.  Essentially I’m offering a route that involves less work, getting you more quickly to delicious pignoli.

However, even if there is less work involved, we need to be honest. These are clearly luxury cookies. A good amount of almonds, and then lots and lots of pine nuts. This is not a cheap recipe, but hey, they are called pignoli and so pine nuts should be used generously. And you want them to taste of something. I tipped two large bags of pine nuts into a bowl for coating the cookies and assumed I had over-calculated. The rest could be toasted and sprinkled into a salad perhaps? But no. I think I ended up with about a dozen pine nuts left in the bowl at the end. So just a word of warning – get those nuts in, and don’t think you’ll be able to wing it with that half-used bag lurking in the baking cupboard.

If you want to play around with the flavours you can add lemon or orange zest, and they would still be pignoli. Or you could skip the pine nuts and use other nuts to coat the cookies – flaked almonds, or chopped hazelnuts, pistachios or cashews would all work – except that you’re then not making pignoli. They’ll still taste great, but they will be something else. This is, of course, a good way to make a batch of visually different cookies using one basic recipe (or if you ignored my warning and ran short of pine nuts…).

One final point worth knowing – there is no flour, butter or milk in pignoli so these little guys just happen to be naturally gluten and lactose-free. This makes them a great choice if you want to impress and you know someone who needs to avoid either in their diet.

To make Pignoli (makes around 20):

For the dough

• 2 large egg whites
• 175g ground almonds
• 100g icing sugar
• 100g granulated sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon almond extract

To decorate

• 200g pine nuts
• icing sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 175°C (345°F) and line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper.

2. In a large bowl, briefly whisk the egg whites until foamy. Add the rest of the dough ingredients and mix to a smooth dough. It should be sticky but you should be able to form it into balls. If too dry, add a little water. If too sticky, add a teaspoon each of ground almonds, granulated sugar and icing sugar and mix well.

3. Take a teaspoon of the dough (around 25g) and form into a ball. Roll in the pine nuts. Transfer to the baking sheet. Leave around 5cm between each cookie, and keep going until all the dough is used up.

4. Lightly press each cookie to flatten slightly, then bake for 15 minutes (turn the tray around half-way to get an even colour). When baked, remove from the oven, allow to cool on the tray. Lightly dust with icing sugar before serving.

{3} Paciencias

Each year that I’ve done my Twelve Bakes of Christmas, I’ve tried to go far and wide in search of inspiration. But each year I come back to the realisation that my selection has ended up being pretty Europe-centric. I’ve included a couple of recipes from America (snickerdoodles and bizcohitos) plus South African soetkoekies, but I’m still on the hunt for other ideas. Well, today – and in the spirit of the famous line from Ghostbusters – we’ve got one!

These are little meringue cookies from the Philippines. They are called paciencias, which derives from the word for patience.

I didn’t find an authoritative single reason as to why they have this name, but I can only surmise that since they are made from whisked egg whites, they would entail quite a lot of patience (as well as a demanding elbow workout) to get them whisked up to make the meringue base in the days before electric mixers. Or perhaps it comes from hungry little hands trying to reach for these cookies, only for parents to have to shoo them away as they try to instil some patience into their little darlings?

The recipe is pretty simple and quick to make – you make a meringue, add a little flour and baking powder for structure and lift, plus some flavouring. Most recipes suggest vanilla, but some also use almond extract. I happen to love all things almond, and I think the combination of vanilla and almond is really delicious, so I decided that I’d do the double.

Then I had a look on the ever-reliable Wikipedia which has a very brief article on paciencias which suggests they are flavoured with “calamansi”. I’ve never heard of this, but it is a citrus fruit grown in the Philippines that is thought to be a kumquat-mandarin cross. So if you wanted to add a little more oomph to the flavour profile, you could add some grated mandarin zest, which also has the added benefit of being a nice little festive touch. I lived on the edge and added a dash of orange zest, and I reckon they were all the better for it.

These took about 10 minutes to make, so they are a good activity with kids who don’t have a long attention span. The piping is pretty easy too – you could try to make them look identical and smooth, but I went for a quick approach and did the squeeze-and-lift, and got what I would politely call the shape of Hershey’s kisses, which I thought looked cute. Someone else in the kitchen said they looked like a tray of nipples, which I ignored! Hey, lockdown has been long and tedious, and we’ve all lost our social filters and have started saying what comes into our heads. Really, first day back in the office? It’s going to be interesting for sure.

Just after baking, the cookies are really nice – light, crisp on the outside and slightly chewy in the middle, and they’re pretty aromatic from the flavourings. Citrus zest was definitely the way to go. These are the kind of cookies which you can put in bowls and people can help themselves to without feeling like they’re eating too much. If you store them for a day or two, they stop being chewy and are completely crisp, which I found made a great companion to ice cream (I’m in lockdown, we need nice things!).

I feel that these are also cookies that will lend themselves to some experimentation. If you were so minded, then I am sure you could fill these cookies in the style of a French macaron. I feel they would suit something sweet and tangy, like lemon or passion fruit curd. They could also be coloured various festive shades, and I can imagine they would look quite jolly with all different shades mixed up in little bags as gifts.

To make Paciencias (makes around 50 cookies):

• 2 large egg whites
• 100g caster sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla or almond extract
• 30g plain flour
• 1/8 teaspoon baking powder
• zest of ¼ mandarin orange

1. Preheat the oven to 135°C (275°F). Line two baking sheets with greaseproof paper and lightly rub with neutral oil.

2. In a large bowl, start to beat the egg whites until they reach stiff peaks. Now add the sugar, a little at a time, and beat well after reach addition. Keep going until you have a smooth, glossy meringue – it should seem quite stiff. Add in the vanilla and/or almond extract and mix well.

3. Combine the flour and baking powder. Pour into the main bowl and add the orange zest, then fold everything together.

4. Put the mixture into a piping bag fitted with a round nozzle. Pipe 4cm (1.5 inch) circles on the baking sheets.

5. Bake the cookies for around 20 minutes until they are still pale but starting to turn lightly golden.

{2} Alfajores

I’ve had alfajores on my list of things to make for a while, and I’ve finally had a go at the famous little Argentinean shortbread cookies filled with dulce de leche caramel. And as is the way of the world, I waited a very long time to try them, then ended up making them a couple of times this year. Turns out they’re pretty popular and go fast.

The first time was back in May in the middle of Lockdown 1 (remember that? And now we’re on Lockdown 3 here in London…possibly until February 2021…). There was a palpable frisson of excitement among European royalty watchers when Queen Maxima of the Netherlands whipped up a batch for her 49th birthday made to her Argentinean mother’s recipe. She explained they are her favourite cookies, and posted pictures of herself in the kitchen standing around in a gold ball gown.

I had a go at Queen Maxima’s recipe, sadly not dressed in formal wear, was going to post them as part of my lockdown baking series. I just never quite got round to it, but they were delicious, and they disappeared pretty quickly. But it did convince me that it was high time for alfajores to appear on my festive baking list.

In preparing for the festive version, I did a little reflecting on what I would like from an alfajor.

I am sure that South Americans have very clear views about what they should be like, but there does seem to be a bit of variety among the various recipes I looked at. Lots of recipes use a lot of cornflour to make them crumbly. This makes sense, and I agree to a point, but if the dough has too much cornflour, I find that it becomes too crumbly when you eat them. Instead I prefer to have a cookie that is slightly crisp and only breaks when I bite into it, as opposed to one that collapses. So my recipe has just a bit of cornflour, which I think gives a nicer texture and makes the dough easier to work with too. I’ve also omitted any eggs or egg yolks. I wanted the cookies to both crumbly but also a bit crisp to contrast with the smooth caramel filling.

I’ve also skipped the addition of lemon zest – I’ve tried alfajores both with and without the lemon, and while I can see that it lifts the flavour a little and cuts through the sweetness as well as being traditional, I just prefer it without. It must be my Scottish sweet tooth. If I’m going to have caramel, I want it to be pure, unadulterated sweetness. To provide the balance to the caramel, I’ve added a generous pinch of salt to the dough instead. I’ve also baked them so they have a slight colour to them. Lots of recipes keep them almost pure white, but I just prefer them to be slightly more baked.

The filling is the famous dulce de leche. You can be efficient and just buy a tin of the stuff. But if you are feeling adventurous, you can make it yourself. When I was a kid, we did this by piercing the top of the tin to release pressure, and we would then let the tin sit in a pan of simmering water for an hour until it had turned into caramel, ready to be added to a banoffee pie. What actually happened was that some water got into the tin, and that wasn’t great if you wanted it to have a nice thick texture. Maybe tin cans have gotten stronger since the 80s, but I recently came across another way – you put a whole tin in water, unopened, and simmer the thing for a few hours. Then leave it to cool, and when you open it the next day, the whole lot has magically turned into thick, luscious dulce de leche. It’s simple, effective, and you get the thrill of living dangerously in case the can does actually explode and coat your kitchen in caramel. But hey, we’re still in various states of lockdown, and cleaning anything sugary from your whole kitchen would give you something to do for at least several hours!

I tried a couple of different techniques in making the cookies, and my clear preference is for the biscuits to be on the thinner side. You’re going to be sandwiching two of them together with a lot of filling, so they need to be thin for two reasons. First, if they’re too thick, the cookies will be too tall. And second, you want to get a good cookie-to-caramel ratio. No-one wants your cookie with too little filling. Mine were 4mm thick, which I achieved by finding two magazines of the requisite thickness, then laying them either side of the dough, and voila – they act as rolling guides when you’re too cheap to buy the real thing. The other thing to embrace is rolling this dough out between two sheets of greaseproof paper. The dough is sufficiently buttery that it will not stick, and since you are not using flour, it means the first cookie will be the same as the last, as you’re not adding more flour as you shape the dough and re-roll the scraps.

If you’re locked down and don’t think you can eat them all over the course of two days, then I would fill them in batches. The cookies will keep well in an airtight tin, and then you can just fill and serve them when you need them. If you leave them to sit, then cookies start to go soft after a couple of days, and while they still taste amazing, you start to lose the textural contrast.

Putting the risky business of the caramel to one side, this is a nice recipe to try with children. The dough is quite forgiving, and you don’t need to worry about cutting out any elaborate shapes. They also love the sandwiching together of the cookies, and trying this out at the weekend I found that there was a material “angel’s share” which was being sneakily scooped from the bowl and not being added to the cookies when a certain little someone thought I was not looking.

To make Alfajores (makes around 30)

For the dulce de leche filling

• 1 tin condensed milk

For the dough

• 175g butter, softened
• 80g icing sugar
• pinch of salt
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4 teaspoons rum
• 200g plain flour
• 50g cornflour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

To finish

• unsweetened desiccated coconut

1. Make the caramel – fill a saucepan with cold water. Put in the tin of condensed milk on its side – there should be a good 3-4cm of water above the tin. Bring the pan to the boil, then turn down the heat, cover the pan, and leave on a simmer for 3 hours. Check it regularly to make sure that the can stays completely immersed – add more water as needed. Turn off the heat, and leave to cool. Do not open the tin while warm – it can explode and cover you in burning caramel!

2. Make the dough. Beat the butter until soft. Add the icing sugar, salt, vanilla and run, and beat until pale, fluffy and completely combined. Add the flour, cornflour and baking powder, and mix everything until you have a smooth dough. Wrap in cling film and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.

3. Preheat the oven to 175°C (350°C). Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper.

4. Roll out the dough to 4-5mm thick. Cut out circles of 4-5cm, and place on the baking sheet. Before baking, place the whole sheet of cut cookies in the freezer for 2 minutes. Then bake the cookies until they are starting to turn golden at the edges (around 8-10 minutes). Turn the tray half-way to get an even colour. Repeat until all the dough has been used. Leave the cookies to cool completely.

4. Time to assemble. Open the cooled tin of condensed milk, and it will magically have transformed into deep golden dulce de leche. Give it a good mix, then take a cookie and add a generous amount of filling. Place another cookie on top, press gently until the filling is just sticking out of the sides. Roll the edge in desiccated coconut.