Note: This Filled Walnut Biscuits recipe was originally part of my Biscuit Advent Calendar, a one-recipe-a-day email series in December. You can find the other recipes and sign up for the next round if you want here.
Today I want to share a recipe with you that I personally like a lot. It is another filled biscuit and it is not one of the iconic ones. But what first brought me to it was that I was searching for a recipe with walnuts (see December 11: a variety of nuts is desired on my biscuit plate). And this one intrigued me with its unusual filling: not the usual pure jam or chocolate with nuts number.
This one is a mix of apricot jam, walnuts, marzipan, and a bit of liqueur.
And I love how the jam offsets the walnuts, it is a really winning combination.
The biscuit itself is a walnut shortbread that I usually cut into discs (that’s how I first came across it and discs are still easiest to fill). It’s sandwiched with the filling and then half a walnut is glued to the top (again using the filling). So it is walnut with walnut and a walnut on top : )
Walnusstaler Recipe
Makes about 50 assembled sandwiches
Ingredients
- 230 g plain flour
- 90 g ground walnuts
- 200 g butter
- 100 g sugar
- 1 egg yolk
- pinch of salt
- Filling
- 100 g marzipan
- 80 g apricot jam
- 80 g ground walnuts
- 2 tbsp liqueur (apricot/walnut/amaretto) or fruit juice
- Decoration
- 50 walnut halves (one per sandwich)
- icing sugar as needed for dusting
Instructions
Make the dough
Knead flour, butter, walnuts, egg yolk, sugar, and salt until they come together into a dough. You can use a kitchen machine or your hands. Don’t knead any more than necessary. Wrap the dough and chill in the fridge for half an hour at least or overnight.
Shape and bake
Preheat the oven to 180°C conventional. Roll the dough to 3 mm thickness (a little on the thinner side is nice since they are doubled later on). Cut out an even number of shapes. Circles are good as they leave plenty of room for the walnut on top. Chill the cutouts again for precision edges and no spreading. Bake for 10-12 minutes. You don’t need brown edges. Let them cool completely.
Make the filling
Meanwhile make the filling by heating all the ingredients in a pot on medium heat until they are well combined. You can let it come to a bubble very briefly. Let it cool down to a consistency where it’s not runny anymore. You can also store it away in the fridge if you don’t go on filling the biscuits right away.
Fill and Decorate
Either with a knife or spoon or piping bag or a freezer bag with a corner snipped off, dollop a little filling into the middle of a biscuit and sandwich another on top. Repeat with all biscuits then use the remainder of the filling to glue half a walnut on top. Dust with icing sugar.
Pack them into tins or boxes between layers of baking parchment. They do last several weeks in a cool place no problem.
Enjoy!!
If you like walnuts, definitely give this a try. Pecans would also be a nice swap.