Alchermes-flavoured “peaches” are a typical Italian traditional peach-shaped pastry. They remind me of my childhood holidays because I used to have them at Christmas, Easter and on Mother’s Day.

They are half globe-shaped cookies stuffed with créme patissiére, hazelnut chocolate cream or jam. The cookies are soaked into Alchermes (i.e. a spices infused scarlet-coloured liqueur) and then covered with sugar. The soaked cookies turn pink and resemble the actual fruit.

The following recipe is the traditional one: wheat flour, sugar, butter, lemon peel and milk. I filled them with spreadable hazelnut chocolate cream and créme patissiére, with leaves of wafer paper for decoration.

Here’s the recipe of our Appetibilis friend Sara Scutti, and… Buon Appetibilis!

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Recipe: Cream Peach Cookies

Ingredients

for cookie dough:

• 500 g wheat flour
• 3 eggs
• 100 g soft butter
• 175 g sugar
• 4 spoonful of milk
• Zest of 1 lemon
• 1 dose of vanilla-flavoured baking powder

for chocolate cream:

• Hazelnut chocolate spread (I’ve used Nutella)

for decoration:

• Alchermes liqueur as required
• Caster sugar as required

Directions

Start with the cookie dough
– Sift the flour, add sugar, lemon peel, diced softened butter, eggs and baking powder. Knead the dough, add milk if required, until you get a soft dough. Let it rest for about 30 minutes.

Make 20 gr balls and place them onto a baking tray covered with greaseproof paper. Bake at 180 °C for about 15-20 minutes. Let cool.

Assemble the cookies/peaches
– With the help of a tea spoon scoop the cookies and scrape out enough crumbs to make space for cream. Fill up two cookies with the chocolate spread and sandwich them together so that the filling comes just to the edge. Here you have a “peach”.

Time to decorate
– Put each peach into a strainer and quickly soak it into the Alchermes, then into the sugar; place them into a paper cup and decorate with some wafers or some fresh mint leaves.

Qui trovate la ricetta delle “Pesche all’alchermes” in italiano