French marzipan cookies
Based on a recipe from an old French notebook, dated back to 1895
Ingredients:
1 kg of sugar
500 g blanched almonds
12 egg whites
* The doses are a bit important, but the notebook contains recipes made long time ago in the small coffee shop and restaurant of the grandfather and great-grandmother of my neighbor Theresa.
* From a dose of 180 g of almonds, 300 g sugar and 2 egg whites, I made 25 middle-sized biscuits.
* You can add some bitter almond flavor or grated Tonka bean
Preparation:
Finely crush the almonds. Then add the egg whites one by one and work the mixture until it is reduced to a smooth paste. When the almonds are well mashed, add the sugar. Make a thick pastry and it let rest covered for about twenty minutes.
Then, grease your hands and roller pin and roll out the dough as for normal biscuits. Cut out different shapes. The recipe does not mention what was the usual form of the marzipan cookies. I saw some square or heart shaped cookies on the net.
Place the biscuits on a large baking dish, covered with parchment paper or greased and floured. Bake in a mild oven. I did it at 175°C.
Cool on a wire rack before serving or storing in a cookie jar.
You can see two more versions of the marzipan cookies on the picture above. A hazelnut one (for the same total amount of nuts, half is replaced with hazelnuts) and the cookies are made smaller. The other is chocolate marzipan. In this case, 125 g of melted chocolate are added to the ingredients.
