Italian Peach Cookies

By ctozzi

Peach cookies that are almost too pretty to eat. You can fill the cookies with Nutella or pastry cream instead of the peach jam if you prefer.

Ingredients

• FILLING:
• 3 large eggs
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup whole milk
• 6 cups all-purpose flour
• Peach jam
• DECORATING:
• Peach Liqueur
• Yellow & red food coloring
• Super fine sugar
• Mint Leaves

Preparation

Step 1

For the cookies, first preheat oven to 350°F.

Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Place the eggs and sugar in a bowl and beat with an electric mixer until light, about 3 minutes.

Add the oil and beat until creamy, then mix in the milk and vanilla. Mix the flour with the baking powder and salt, then add this to the batter and beat just until it is combined.

Take a small amount of batter in your hands, and roll into a ball about 1 1/2 inches for large, 3/4 of an inch for the small sized cookies and place these on the baking sheets.

Continue to roll out all of the batter into balls, and then bake for about 15 to 20 minutes or until very light brown on the bottom.
Cool well.

For the filling, use a sharp knife, and cut out a circle at the bottom of the cookie removing the cookie centers and placing these in a bowl.

Be careful not to cut completely through the cookies, but you need to make space for the filling.

Once you have cut the bottom of each cookie, break up the cookie pieces you have cut out into fine crumbs.

Add enough of the peach jam to the cookie crumbs until you have a sticky filling.

Carefully fill each cookie, and then matching cookies or shape and size, place two cookies together, using the peach mixture as glue to hold the cookies together.

Clean any peach jam that may ooze from the seams.

To decorate, place about 1/2 cup of the peach liqueur in two separate bowls, and color one yellow and the other red.

In a third bowl, place the super fine sugar. (I found the cookies worked better if the colors were fairly strong.)

Carefully dip each cookie pair into the red mixture first 3/4 of the way up the cookie, then dip the other end in the yell mixture.

I found that if I then dipped the yellow end briefly in the red liquid it created a more natural looking color.

Gently blot the cookie with paper towels to remove most of the liquid, then immediately roll the cookie in the sugar.

Place the finished cookie on a sheet of waxed paper to dry and continue to color the rest of the cookies in the same manner.

Once the cookies have dried, you can insert a couple of mint leaves and a whole clove to resemble a peach.