Flucker's reicpe for Alfajor

One day I got a cooking lesson with Flucker on how to make alfajor. Actually, I was just the translator tagging along for Flucker teach another volunteer cook (Amy) how to make alfajor. It was great to watch him give the lesson as a full cooking class and have a front row seat to watching two cooks do what they love. The resulting cookies were delicious and surprisingly easy to make.

Ingredients:

• Prepare a bag of Manjar Blanco/dulce de leche -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulce_de_leche
• Mix 2 parts of sweetened condensed milk to 1 part sugar, and reduce until carmelized.
• Place in a pastry bag (or in our case a ziploc baggie with a hole cut out of a corner)

Ingredients

1 kilo of flour

1/2 kilo of pork manteca (You can use vegetable shortening, but the pork fat was tasty)

4 egg yolks (You can save the egg whites for Pisco sours!)

400g of condensed milk -- 350ml or 1.5 cups of milk

1 tablespoon of vanilla (This is an estimate because it was done by hand or "al gusto")

1 teaspoon of salt (This is also an estimate -- "al gusto")

1. On the table or a large shallow pan pour out most of the flour into a mound and then create a well in the middle to hold the yolks, manteca and milk. (This is a similar technique to making pasta)
2. In the well of flour, add the manteca, yolks and milk, vanilla and salt.
3. Combine the ingredients by hand by adding the flour from the edge of the flour well and keeping the liquid in the center.
4. Keep working the dough, by rolling, combining, stretching and pulling until it becomes tacky. (If it gets too tacky add a little flour to keep it from sticking to the surface.)
5. Your are done mixing when the dough can be torn off and thrown at the table and it stick and in tearing it off it isn't too stretchy.
6. Preheat oven to 180(C) -- 350(F).
7. Tear off a thumb sized hunk of dough (1/2 oz) and form into a rough ball
8. Place on a cooking sheet and press using the heel of your palm to make a disc of dough about 1.5-2 inches in diameter
9. Make about 30 -40 discs (It goes pretty quick once you get used to it)
10. Take a fork and poke twice into top of cookie to let air escape
11. Place in heated over for about 10 minutes and golden brown
12. Remove from oven and let cool for 2-5 minutes.
13. Take one cooled cracker, spread dulce de leche inside and place another cracker on top to make the cookie.
14. For extra credit, you can sprinkle all the cookies with powdered sugar.

The cookies should be served cool, but if people are around they will be eaten before you get too dessert. It goes a lot better if it is made with love.