Alright, so as a result of egg replacement experiments I had most of a can of sweetened condensed milk that I needed to find a use for…
So let’s try a basic shortbread sandwich cookie, turning the sweetened condensed milk into dulce de leche and using that to glue two cookies together.
The shortbread cookie recipe I used as a base has very standard ratios, and is from the King Arthur Flour cookbook.
Cooking Sugar Milk
You can turn sweetened condensed milk into dulce de leche by cooking it for a long time. There are multiple ways to do it, including boiling an unopened can (!) and in the oven. I used a double boiler and cooked the milk for like, 4 hours? It became thicker and closer to a caramel sauce. It could have cooked longer and gotten been darker I think, but it was late and I wanted to go to sleep.
Definitely look at one of the other methods next time - most things I read for making dulce de leche in the oven claimed to finish a bit faster.
Cookie Time
1 stick of (softened/room temp) butter, 1/2 t. of salt, and 60g sugar were creamed together in a mixer at a slow speed for a couple minutes.
120 g of flour and 1 tsp. cinnamon were then added to the mixture and combined.
It would have been nice maybe to add some coconut, to make something closer to alfajores (another cookie to add to the list of things to try…) but I didn’t have any :(
Just mixing in the cinnamon a bit more.
The mixture was rolled into a cylinder and thrown in the freezer for a while (3 hours in my case, but it doesn’t need to be that long.).
After freezing, the log was sliced into 1/4 inch pieces, and the cookies laid out on a sheet pan. Each cookie was docked.
Not quite circular, but that’s fine. Picture was taken 2 minutes into baking oven since I forgot to take it beforehand.
The cookies were baked for 20 minutes at 300 F, and then let to cool on the tray.
Looking good!
The dulce de leche was heated so it became smooth and scoopable.
The shortbread cookies were paired with similar-shaped shortbreads in order to make good looking sandwiches once paired.
Warm and stirry, not quite able to drizzle.
A scoop (around 1 tsp) of dulce de leche was scooped onto the bottom of one cookie, then its pair was lightly pressed into the goop. The cookies were pressed to spread the goop out near the edge of the cookie.
Looking kinda do-si-do-al.
I really like the way these turned out. The shortbread’s really buttery, lightly cinnamony, and the dulce de leche provices a great creaminess to go with it.