ABC - Homemade Rondo's

Happy belated New Year! I hope you had a good holiday season with lots of oven trips :)

We're starting 2016 with a new recipe source: WeekendBakery.com. I couldn't be more excited about that. I've baked recipes from this blog before with great results and I'm certain you will too.

The first ABC recipe of the year is: Homemade Rondo's. This is a traditional Dutch pastry consisting of a buttery crust with a sweet almond filling that gets its slight tang from the citrus zest. I love how Rondo's are decorated with a whole almond on top. I grew up on these cookies. I usually got them from the grocery store. Sometimes I'd splurge and buy them from a fancy bakery, eating them slightly warm. Yum! I have to admit that these homemade Rondo's are another step above that.

Homemade Dutch almond pastries called Rondo's

If you'd like to join the ABC bakers in their monthly baking adventures, please go to the ABC blog for more information.


Step-by-step pictures:

Instead of rolling out the dough, I used my tart shaper/tamper. 

Push dough against the muffin pan sides.

Each ball of dough weighs 35 grams.

A fresh raspberry inside each Rondo for a little surprise :)

Golden brown deliciousness

See the raspberry? :)

The last one didn't have a raspberry, but it's just as yummy! Bon Appetit!

Final thoughts/tips:

• Hubby tasted his "half" of the cookie on the day I baked them. I thought he'd find them too buttery. Instead, he loved them and gave them a 9 out of 10 rating. Score!
• I loved these! The buttery crust just melts in your mouth. The citrus-y almond filling is delicious and the raspberry complimented the pastry wonderfully (I love almonds + raspberries together). And the toasted whole almond on top seals the deal. Really, I had little a party in my mouth going on!
• There were some tweaks that I made which can be found at the bottom of this blog post. Some highlights:
• Since I didn't have pastry flour, I used a substitution from The Pie and Pastry Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. Basically, you use 2/3 all-purpose flour and 1/3 cake flour, by weight.
• Some ABC bakers had mentioned that the recipe was a tad too sweet, so I reduced the amount of sugar in the crust and used a mix of granulated sugar and brown sugar.
• In the almond paste, I used grapefruit zest instead of lemon zest. This worked really well.
• For a little surprise, I added a fresh raspberry to each Rondo.
• The original recipe can be found HERE.
• Please check out the other ABC bakers' results on the ABC blog.

Homemade Rondo's

(adapted from WeekendBakery.com)

Yields: 9 Rondo's

Crust ingredients

• 133 g all purpose flour
• 67 g cake flour
• 5 g baking powder
• Pinch of salt
• 150 g cold butter in cubes
• 35 g granulated sugar
• 35 g dark brown sugar
• 1 recipe of almond paste
• 9 whole unblanched almonds
• egg wash for brushing tops (I used egg yolk beaten with some water and cream)

Almond Paste ingredients

• 75 g unblanched almond meal
• 75 g granulated sugar
• zest of 1/2 grapefruit
• little bit of water
• 1 large egg, beaten (added on "baking day")

Please follow the instructions on WeekendBakery.com.