Mini Florentines

These are the Italian lace cookies that everyone loves. It’s a great cookie because it's crispy, thin, flavorful, and way easy to eat. The only problem – it’s sort of big and breaks easily.

I didn’t want to change too much in terms of the recipe. I love everything about florentines. I just wanted them to be… well, smaller. What I ended up doing was to not only reduce the size – those who have made florentines before know that the cookie spreads like crazy with just the smallest amount of batter, but I also used whole ground almonds – skin and all into the batter. What the almond skins did do was to add fiber and thicken up the batter more so that it would spread less. The result was still a crunchy thin cookie with sweet almond and toffee flavors, but it was smaller and just a wee bit thicker. This gave the cookie some substance and kept me from eating the entire batch of cookies in one sitting. Also, with greater substance from the batter, I was able to roll out the dough into a log and cut more uniform pieces that would become my cookies instead of spooning the thinner batter with a spoon, which can get messy.

A special note is that the dough can get a bit dry with the almond skins, so feel free to adjust with additional tablespoons of cream. Also, these cookies do have a tendency to feel greasy because of the butter content. Prior to storing them, you can put them on a paper towel to absorb any extra grease.

Florentine Log

Leaving Room for Spread

Fork-Pressed

Drizzle with Chocolate

Ingredients - 1 3/4 cups whole almonds (skins on) - 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour - 1 tablespoon grated orange zest - 1 tablespoon grated lemon zest - 1/4 teaspoon fine salt - 3/4 cup sugar - 3-4 tablespoons heavy cream - 2 tablespoons light corn syrup - 5 tablespoons unsalted butter - 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Directions 1. Preheat to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. 2. Pulse the almonds in a food processor to coarse grounds. Stir together the nuts, flour, zest and salt in a large bowl. 3. In a small saucepan, put in the sugar, cream, corn syrup and butter. Cook over medium heat until mixture comes to a rolling boil. Continue to boil for 1 minute. Remove from heat and stir in the vanilla. Pour this mixture into the almond mixture and stir just to combine. Set aside to cool for 30 minutes until cool enough to handle. 4. Roll into two 8-inch logs. Cut into half inch slices and put onto sheet pan. Press the cookies slightly with a fork. 5. Bake cookies in the middle rack for about 10 minutes, rotating the cookie sheet after 5 minutes. Transfer to wire rack to cool. Cookies maybe put on a paper towel to absorb any excess oil before serving.