2007 Holiday Party: Almond Crescents

The third and last sweet snack we had for our party were the almond crescents from Simply Recipes. I will have to try making these again when I am not also making lots of other things and am less pressed for time, because shaping them was quite a challenge, and I am curious if I can make them prettier if I can devote more time to shaping each cookie. We had leftover ganache from making the chocolate kisses and so we dipped the ends of some of the cookies into it. These dipped cookies were definitely the more popular ones.



Almond Crescents
Adapted from Simply Recipes

1 cup butter, room temperature
⅔ cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract
2½ cups flour
1 cup almond flour (can substitute ground almonds*)
¼ cup powdered sugar for sprinkling

*You can use slivered, blanched almonds and grind them up, but you will have a very crumbly, hard to work with dough. It’ll still taste good though. (This is what I did, and the dough was, indeed, very hard to work with. Since I haven't tried using almond flour yet, I cannot comment on how much easier it would have been had I followed the recipe more accurately.)

1. Cream the butter and the sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the extracts and mix.

2. Add the flour and almond flour. Mix thoroughly.

3. Take generous tablespoons of the dough (it will be slightly crumbly) and roll it into a small ball, about an inch in diameter, and then shape into a crescent shape. Place onto parchment paper and bake at 350°F for 15-20 minutes or until a light golden brown.

4. Dust with powdered sugar.

For added decadence let the cookies cool and dip one end of them into some melted chocolate, then let the chocolate harden. (I had some trouble melting the chocolate without adding any liquid to it, but as noted above, using the ganache from the chocolate kisses worked great.)

Makes about 2½ dozen cookies.