Florentine Cookies + The Cookiepedia Book Giveaway {Winners Announced}
, and I've been dying to make something, or everything, from it.
So when I spotted a recipe for Florentines in her book, I knew I had to make them. And although Florentines are known to be an Italian treat (as the name suggests), I first fell in love with these crunchy, nutty discs of caramelized delight back when I was a teenager working at an Austrian bakery. When I googled this, I realized that appears to be a small debate regarding the Florentine cookie's origin, but it's safe to say that it is celebrated in not only Italy and Austria, but now here in my kitchen. These are the most decadent and surprisingly simple cookies to prepare in all of the land, and I'll just never get over them. I won't.
Florentine Cookies with Chocolate Drizzles
Decadent nutty, buttery, caramelized cookie discs drizzled in dark chocolate. Recipe as printed in The Cookiepedia cookbook by Stacy Adimando.
- 1 cup 227 grams unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 1 1/4 cups 250 grams sugar
- 2 tablespoons 60 grams corn syrup
- 1 tablespoon 8 grams all-purpose flour
- 1/3 cup 80 ml heavy cream (whipping cream)
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 2 1/3 cups 210 grams sliced almonds
- 4 ounces 120 grams roughly chopped bittersweet chocolate
- Preheat the oven to 375 °F. Line a few baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats. Set them aside.
- Melt the butter, sugar and corn syrup together over medium heat. Add the flour and whisk to combine. Add the cream and salt and do the same.
- Let cook until the mixture comes to a full boil, and then add in the almonds and stir to combine. Continue cooking for 3 more minutes until the mixture thickens and starts to move around the pan in one mass. Take the pan off the heat.
- Drop 4 small spoonfuls of dough onto cookie sheets, leaving as much room between them as possible (the baked cookies will spread to about triple the size).
- Using an offset spatula or a wet hand, spread and flatten the batter into 3-inch rounds, creating a thin layer.
- Bake for 5 to 8 minutes, or until edges are brown and centers are just turning golden.
- Remove the cookie sheets from the oven and immediately reshape the cookies back into 3-inch circles, using the offset spatula or the back of a spoon to drag the batter back into place and round the edges. The cookies will harden within a few minutes.
tip: if they harden too fast, just return them to the oven for a minute or so.
- Cool the reshaped cookies until they are firm and cool enough to handle. Then move them to a wire rack covered with parchment paper to set completely.
- As the optional (though delicious and suggested) finisher, melt the chocolate, in a glass or metal bowl over a pot of simmering water on the stove. Drizzle the melted chocolate over the tops of the Florentines. Let harden.
Florentine Ice Cream Sandwiches
- When the cookies have cooled completely, skip the chocolate drizzle. Let a container of coffee or vanilla ice cream sit out, or microwave at 10-second intervals, until it's soft enough to dollop. In the meantime, lay half the Florentines on a parchment-lined baking sheet flat side up. Drop a heaping spoonful of the softened ice cream (about 2-3 tablespoons) into the center of each. Top with the remaining cookies and press lightly to adhere. Cover the baking sheet loosely with foil and place in the freezer for at least 2 hours.
- I used a 1-tablespoon capacity cookie scoop for my cookies, and they spread quite a bit, yielding more of a very thin, large 5 1/2-inch round cookie, but I love them this size, so I simply worked to round the edges when they first came out of the oven. Use about 1 teaspoon size spoon for 3-inch cookies, or somewhere in between.
- Much like a caramel concoction of any kind, the longer you heat (bake) the cookies, the darker and more intense the caramel flavour and colour will be, so there is a little room for personal preference with the baking times. I baked 1 sheet at a time on the middle rack of the oven, and kept the cookies in for the full 8 minutes. Once they start to turn golden, they have the potential to burn very quickly, so I recommend keeping a super-close eye on them at that point, and remove them from the oven quickly.
- It might seem as though it's going to take a lifetime to bake 36 cookies when 4-to-a-tray, but at 8 minutes each, time, it goes by really quickly!
- I just used a fork to "fling" the melted chocolate onto the cookies in a fun drizzly criss-cross pattern.
- Stacy mentions that these cookies are best enjoyed right after cooling, and I can certainly agree that these are amazing in that window of time (I could not stop eating them), but I then sealed them in a Ziploc bag after the chocolate drizzle set, and they're still going strong (ahem) and tasting fabulous at the end of day 2.
