Polvorones - Spanish Almond Cookies

All my last month's pending challenges will be posted this month. Last month's International Food Challenge started by Saraswathi and Shobana, was hosted by Sharanya. Every month a region's cuisine is explored and for the month of February it was Andalusia, the southern part of Spain. She gave us four recipes and we were to choose any one from them. At first I wanted to try out a savoury dish but at the last moment I changed my mind and made these cookies. Polvorones are famous throughout Spain during Christmas. On the day of preparation, I had some guests and I was happy that I could serve these with coffee. The preparation was quite easy and the cookies turned out crispy and flaky and so delicious. Making the almond flour was the only lengthy task needed for these cookies, but if you can get it in stores then it is fine. While grinding the blanched almonds, pulse it in a mixer along with 2-3 tbs of flour to get a nice non clumpy flour. 

Recipe Source: Sea Salt With Food

Makes 16 Cookies

Ingredients:

Flour/ Maida-110 gm

Icing Sugar-40 gm

Almond Flour- 50 gm

Unsalted Butter-100 gm

Procedure:

1. Preheat oven to 150C.

2. In a bowl cream together butter and icing sugar.

3. Add the almond flour and flour to the butter mixture and mix to form a soft dough.

4. Roll it on a lightly floured counter and cut out cookies with your favourite cutter.

5. Arrange on a greased baking tray.

6. Bake the cookies for 20 minutes or until slightly brown.

7. Allow them to cool on wire rack.

8. Dust with icing sugar and serve.

Take butter and sugar.

Mix flour and almond flour.

Cream butter sugar using a wooden spatula.

Add the flour mixture.

Knead dough and roll into a thick disc.

Cut the cookies using a cutter.

Arrange on a greased baking tray and bake.

Dust with icing sugar and serve.

Snow Men Butter Cookies

This month's Home Baker's Challenge was hosted by Priya of Cook Like Priya. As December is the month of Christmas, she had suggested three cookies recipes, two cakes and two bread recipes. We were to choose any of the given recipes. I loved the look of this snow man cookie and so I tried it out. It was very colourful, crispy and very delicious. My daughter loved them. It was full of butter flavour and my house was so aromatic when these cute cookies were baking in the oven. It is a very easy dough but you need a lot of patience to make the figurines. The given recipe yields more than 20 cookies. 

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