Ghouriba Bahla

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Submitted by: Badreddine A.
Recipe Source Country: Morocco
Cooking/Prep time: < 10 min

This is the kind of Moroccan pastries I like the most, and makes me remember home. We enjoyed cooking together and the cookies are very tasty.

Ingredients

  • 250g (8 1/2 oz) ground raw almonds
  • 125g (4 2/5 oz) caster (superfine, not powdered) sugar
  • pinch of salt
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 70g (2 ½ oz) salted butter
  • 4 egg yolks
  • 2 tsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
  • zest of 1 lemon (optional)
  • 1 tsp orange blossom water
  • a small bowl of icing sugar/powdered sugar – optional

Directions

  1. Preheat the oven to 180˚C/350˚F.
  2. Mix the ground almonds, caster sugar, salt and baking powder thoroughly in a medium sized bowl and set aside.
  3. In another bowl, mix the butter and egg yolks together with a wooden spoon for about a minute, you won’t get a smooth mixture, don’t worry about it.
  4. Add 1 tsp lemon juice, lemon zest if using and orange blossom water and mix again.
  5. Add the dry ingredients of almonds to the egg yolk and butter mixture and stir with the wooden spoon to mix as best as you can.
  6. Finish off with your hands, using only the tip of your fingers as we don’t want to knead the dough. Bring it all together, it will be a soft dough.
  7. In a small bowl, mix the other teaspoon of lemon juice with some water for forming the cookies.
  8. Wetting your fingers with the lemon water, form little dough balls, roll them in the icing sugar (if you like, optional) and place on a baking sheet, leaving some space between each cookie. Don’t flatten the cookie, it will naturally spread.
  9. Bake in the preheated oven for about 15 minutes, depending on how hot your oven gets. Every oven is different. You are aiming for a pale golden colour.
  10. Leave to cool completely before removing from the baking sheet.
  11. Store in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks. You can even freeze them, well covered for up to the usual 3 months.

Instead of ground raw almonds we used almond flour, and we also couldn’t find orange blossom water so we put some zest in boiling water make some.

Badreddine Ait Bouchnani - Ghouriba Bahla preparing