Ay yi yi! Alfajores!

I was in a baking mood last night and, for some reason, was on an evaporated milk kick. I browsed the internet for at least an hour looking for the perfect recipe to use up one of my cans of evaporated milk.

This recipe from Carnation promised me South American wonderfulness.

The amazing Argentinian, Peruvian, and Arabic (?!) ALFAJORES!

I used the Carnation recipe for the Dulce de Leche filling.

I combined this recipe and this recipe in order to make the cookies.

I had to find a recipe that used powdered sugar instead of regular sugar because I don't normally keep 2 cups of cornstarch in my repertoire.

I started by making the Dulce de Leche, because the recipe said it would take a ridiculous two hours.

Cinnamon!

Evaporated Milk!

Homemade Double Boiler!

I then set to work on making the dough.

It started out scarily crumbly.

I felt like I was making biscuits.

Then, magically, the dough began to form in my mixer and I had a big ball of deliciousness to pop in the fridge for half an hour.

Finally, it was time to roll out the dough and cut out the cookies.

The accouterments needed to make this recipe could be a baking supply shopping list in and of itself.

Note to self:

Need to buy regular cookie cutters, rolling pin, parchment paper, and double boiler.

Or!

You could always improvise like me.

Roll it out by hand, use a white wine class to cut the uniform circles, and just grease the damn cookie sheet.

Then bake!

These cookies are very delicate.

They're supposed to be a biscuit-y consistency.

Well... biscuit-y apparently stands for super fragile and crumbly.

After making all the cookies and letting them cool on my handy new cooling racks - best buy ever! - I set to work on filling the cookies and adorning them with tasty treats.

I was a bit impatient as my Dulce de Leche was not quite done.

I ended up taking it out of the double boiler and just putting it on the burner and stirring like a madwoman.

Yeah, don't do that.

It will leave little burnt crystals of caramel in your otherwise smooth and creamy dulce de leche. Not good.

After the caramel disaster, I finally started filling those cookies...

Well, I tried.

They're not the most structurally sound cookies in the world.

You're supposed to push the cookies together until the dulce de leche oozes out the sides so that you can roll the excess caramel in shredded coconut, chopped nuts, or cocoa powder.

As you can see, most of my cookie sandwiches cracked under pressure (oh, and I am cracking myself up... pun city over here!) and didn't make it to the oozing stage.

I managed to get two cookie sandwiches to ooze properly.

I then dusted them liberally with powdered sugar - partially to sweeten them up and partially to hide the saddest looking of the cookies.

I thought they were alright - fairly rich, but dry, crumbly, and not extremely flavorful.

I'll eat them - gladly. Being the only sweets in the house right now, I will definitely take them.

The boyfriend, however, was not impressed.

He didn't like the consistency and thought that the cookies were lacking in the flavor and sweetness departments.

Guess I'm being left alone with a batch of cookies to eat...

There goes my diet!

Bon appétit,

Gabriella