Jim's Favorite Cookie: Milano

Here is the recipe for Milano Cookies that my Dad and Jim love so much.

Ingredients:
1 cup whole almond (toasted and cooled)
3/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons sugar (divided)
3/4 cup all-purpose flour (I used unbleached bread flour)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter (softened)
1 large egg (I used egg beaters)
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
4 ounces semisweet chocolate or bittersweet chocolate



Toast almonds- spread on baking sheet and insert in preheated 350 oven, stirring frequently, for about 10 minutes or until nuts are lightly toasted to pale golden brown.

Sift the flour, baking powder and salt onto a sheet of parchment paper and set aside.

Doing this over parchment paper makes this easy to fold up like a taco and pour into your mixer.

Measure 3/4 cup of sugar.

Process almonds in food processor with just 3 T of sugar (from the 3/4 cup) until almonds are finely ground.

Set on parchment paper.

Cream butter in a mixer with what is left from the 3/4 C sugar until mixture is light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Stop and scrape down the sides if necessary.

Measure egg substitute,

add almond extract. With mixer running, add egg and almond extract. Stop and scrape down the sides if necessary.

Add the almond crumbs and mix until smooth.

On low speed, beat in flour mixture.

Scrape down sides of mixer.

Wrap dough tightly in plastic wrap. Refrigerate at least 2 hours (or until well chilled) or up to 5 days.

The next day, the dough is very hard, stands up on its own.

Line baking sheets with parchment paper, lightly butter them or use a silpat.

Using a teaspoon, roll the dough into balls.

Position racks in oven to center and top third of oven and preheat to 350. After 5 minutes, this is what my cookie balls look like.

After five minutes, switch the position of the sheets from top to bottom and front to back.

Cook another five minutes until lightly browned all over. Mine are not brown yet, so I keep them in for 5 more minutes (a total of 17 minutes for me.) Let cookies cool on the sheets for a few minutes, then transfer to cooling racks and cool completely.

For these cookies, I'm using a good semi-sweet chocolate.

Melt chocolate using a double boiler or you could microwave for a 5-10 seconds in a microwave safe dish.

Spread 1/2 tsp on the underside of a cookie, then lightly sandwich between another cookie. Alternatively-a parchment cone can be filled with melted chocolate and the chocolate can be piped onto cookies before being sandwiched.

Refrigerate cookies to set chocolate initially, but they can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for some time.

I really like the way the pecan cookie tasted, although I didn’t care for the thickness of the cookies. I also wanted a thicker chocolate middle. I made these again and formed the cookie dough into ovals and then flattened them out. They really don’t spread too much, so a thin oval or flattened round cookie works best. THEN, I coated the underside of two cookies and let them sit on the counter for a minute or two before sandwiching them together. This let the chocolate set a little bit and gave me the desired thickness of chocolate filling.

When compared to the original Milano cookie, I thought this dough was denser than the Pepperidge farm variety that is light and crispy. Maybe I need to pulverize the pecans more, but I thought I got it pretty fine. These were VERY good, but my final thought would be to flatten the cookie dough before baking and definitely do a thicker chocolate filling. What did Jim think? He liked them, and asked if I could make the chocolate mint variety next time. Hmmm… any ideas how to do that? Can I add peppermint extract to the melted chocolate? Should I make another paste flavored with mint and do one cookie For the with regular chocolate and the other cookie with mint paste – then sandwich together?