Polvorones: Spanish Almond Shortbread

Part 1: toasting flour and almonds

The day before, or a few hours earlier:

1. Preheat the oven to 160º fan-forced – or 180º if using a conventional oven.
2. Spread the flour on an oven tray and bake it for at least 15 minutes, until it gets a light toasted colour.
3. Take it out from the oven and mix it lightly with a fork to break it up. Leave it to cool completely.
4. Spread the whole raw almonds (peeled or unpeeled) on a tray and toast them in the oven for 10 minutes, watch them so they don’t get burnt. You can also use almond meal but you will need to watch it carefully as it will take less time to toast. Burnt almonds will give the polvorones a bitter taste.
5. Remove from the oven and allow to cool completely.

Part 2: Making the biscuits

1. Ensure the oven is preheated to 190º fan-forced – or 210º if using a conventional oven. Line a large biscuit tray.
   When the flour and the almonds have completely cooled (if you do part 1 on the same day), sift the flour and icing sugar into a bowl, add almond meal, cinnamon and salt then mix in the soft lard to make a dough. The dough should be a little bit sticky, but not too much. If it feels dry, add a little bit of olive oil until it comes together.
2. Make the dough into a ball, flatten a bit and leave it in the fridge for 30 minutes.
   After that, roll out the dough until it is 1 – 1.5 cm thick (we don’t want thin polvorones). It will be around a 20×30 cm rectangle.
3. With a small cookie cutter (4 cm diameter) cut as many circles as you can. Put them on the paper-lined tray. They don’t expand in the oven so no need for big spaces between them. Put together the leftover dough and cut more circles until there is no dough. You should get around 30 biscuits.
4. Bake them for 10-12 minutes in the oven, until you see a light colour around the edges. We don’t want them toasted on top.
   Remove from the oven and let them cool down on the tray. Don’t touch them until they are completely cool (you can wait until the next day) because they are very delicate and they will ‘melt’ and dissolve.
5. Once they are completely cool sprinkle them very generously with icing sugar, until they are completely covered.
6. And now you can wrap them in silk paper, to make them look more traditional and for better preservation. If you can’t find silk paper you can cut tissue paper into 19 x17cm rectangles.
   Place a biscuit in the centre of the paper, fold the sides over the biscuit and twist the ends like a bon-bon.

Store the polvorones in a tin. They will keep for a couple of months but they won’t last that long as they’re so delicious!