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
- Preheat the oven to 180˚C/350˚F.
- Mix the ground almonds, caster sugar, salt and baking powder thoroughly in a medium sized bowl and set aside.
- 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.
- Add 1 tsp lemon juice, lemon zest if using and orange blossom water and mix again.
- 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.
- 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.
- In a small bowl, mix the other teaspoon of lemon juice with some water for forming the cookies.
- 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.
- 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.
- Leave to cool completely before removing from the baking sheet.
- 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.