A - Almond Amaretto Cookies

I should get bonus points for using 2 A's in the first recipe of my challenge. I'm pretty proud of myself, I almost forgot about this project... haha it must have been some form of hypothermia from last weekend.

So, Almond Amaretto cookies (try saying that 5 times). I took some recipes that I read online and made a few tweaks to make them almost a fusion of the traditional chinese almond cookies and an italian almond cookie.

The Ingredients

* 1 softened stick of butter (1/2 cup)
* 1/2 cup white sugar
* 1 egg
* 3/4 cup ground almonds
* 1 cup all-purpose flour
* 2 tsps amaretto liqueur
* 1/2 tsp pure almond extract

For this recipe, I preheated the oven to 400 degrees F.

For the almonds, I only had a container of mixed roasted unsalted nuts, so I picked out a bunch of almonds and ground them up in the Magic Bullet until I had about 3/4 cup. I think you can use up to 1 cup of ground almonds, but it was getting hard picking up the almonds at the bottom haha



I started by softening the butter by leaving it out at room temperature, but then I got busy with work, then had dinner and totally forgot about it! I think I left it out from 2pm to 10pm. Hopefully it was safe to use.

So we cream the butter with the 1/2 cup of sugar



Then we add the egg once the butter and sugar mixture is smooth and creamy



I used a bottle of Amaretto liquor that I got from Trader Joe's. It was like $6.99, pretty cheap so I don't know how good it is, but I think it works for baking.



So we add 2 teaspoons of the Amaretto liquor and the ground almonds to our mixture



After all the ground almonds and Amaretto are mixed in, slowly incorporate the 1 cup of flour. I incorporated 1/4 cup at a time and scraped the sides to get it all in.



Mix all these ingredients well and then I added some almond extract for some additional almond oomph!



This is what my batter looked like in the end, so you can see there are little bits of almond throughout. nom!



I took the teaspoon I used for the amaretto to measure out drops of batter and dumped them on a cookie sheet I lined with foil. I use foil because I try to reduce my cleanup as much as possible (I'm lazy to do any more dishes than necessary)



I shaped each mound into more roundish shapes and topped each of the mounds with an almond. Again, I was lazy to dig deep to get the almonds at the bottom of the jar, so I ended up using some raw sliced almonds that I had laying around.

kinda embarrassing, u can see the bottom of my oven, so gross.



I baked the cookies at 400 degrees F for 8 minutes. They came out a little whiter than I expected, but they still tasted good. Not too sweet and a nice subtle almond flavor in a soft cookie. :)



I think this recipe should yield about 24 - 30 cookies if you make them about 1 tsp size like I did. I only made 12 for this blog entry, so I have some batter left which I refrigerated. I'll update this blog later if the results of the refrigerated batter varied in any way. Yay for my first accomplished recipe. :)