Italian Peach Cookies

     So for our monthly Crafternoon with the ladies I decided to make something sweet and springy to bring over.  I went searching on Pinterest, one of my favorite sites, and came across this recipe for Italian Peach Cookies from this great site Key Ingredient.  They turned out amazing and looked just like a peach!

Ingredients

Cookies:

3 large eggs

2 cups sugar

1 cup vegetable oil

1 tsp vanilla

4 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup whole milk

6 cups all purpose flour

Filling:

Peach Jam

Decorations:

Peach liqueur

Yellow & Red food coloring

Super fine sugar

Mint leaves

Whole cloves

Preparations:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees 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 minutes.  Add the oil and beat until creamy, then mix in the milk and vanilla.  In another bowl sift the flour, 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 or 3/4 inch for small sized cookies and place these on the baking sheets.  Continues to roll out all the batter into balls then bake for about 15-20 minutes or until very light brown on the bottoms.  Let cool.

For the filling, use a sharp knife or melon baller and cut/scoop out a circle at the bottom of the cookie, removing the cookie centers and placing these in a bowl for later.  Be careful not to cut/scoop completely through the cookies, but you need to make space for the filling.

Once you have the cut bottom of each cookie, break up the cookie pieces you have cut out into fine crumbs.  Add enough peach jam to the cookie crumbs until you have a sticky filling.  Carefully fill each cookie, 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 that that may ooze from the seams.

To decorate, place about 1/2 cup of peach liqueur into two separate bowls, and color one yellow and the other red.  In a third bowl, place the super fine sugar.  (The cookies work better if the colors are 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 yellow mixture.  (Found if you dipped the yellow end briefly in the red liquid it created a more natural looking color.  Gently blot the cookies with paper towels to remove most of the liquid, then immediately roll the cookie in sugar.  Place the finished cookie on a sheet of waxed paper to dry and continue to color the rest of the cookies the same way.

Once the cookies have dried, you can insert a couple of mint leaves 

and a whole clove to resemble a peach.

Godere!