Lemon Sandwich Cookies filled with White Chocolate and Marzipan

I wanted a buttery lemon sandwich cookie I could use as a counterpart to my chocolate sandwich cookie.  I think these will work particularly nicely. 

Lemon Sandwich Cookie Dough: 

 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter,

 2 cups all-purpose flour,

 1/2 cup of granulated sugar,

 1 lemon worth of zest,

 1 egg yolk,

 1 tsp vanilla or lemon extract

 1/8 tsp ground nutmeg,

 1/8 tsp salt 

 1 or 2 bars of good quality white chocolate, such as “Just Us”. 

 Almond paste or marzipan

To make the dough: Beat the room temperature butter and the sugar together until creamy, this will take about one minute. Add the egg yolk and extract to the butter and mix until combined. Finally stir in the remaining dry ingredients by hand. Divide the dough in two and flatten each piece into a disk or rectangle, wrap in parchment paper and refrigerate for an hour. 

You can use store bought marzipan or you can make it yourself. (I make my own nut pastes by grinding nuts in my mortar & pestle and adding a touch of confectioner’s sugar, oil and maple syrup to the mix, but I don’t usually measure, so I will have to amend this post later to give you the exact amounts I use in my recipe. ) 

Roll the dough and the marzipan out between sheets of parchment paper, I use one big piece and fold it over. You can fold it and use the inside fold to shape the edges of your dough into a perfect square or rectangle. I use a small crinkle cutter to make the biscuits and the filling rounds, which were rolled quite thin; 1/8 inch thick for the dough and 1/16 for the marzipan. (the recipe works well for shortbread bar cookies too, just make them 1/4  to 1/2 inch thick) 

Bake the cookies at 350f on parchment lined paper until the edges are golden brown.  When you remove them from the oven flip half of them over on the paper and place a square of the chocolate on top, as they begin to melt pat each of them down a little, then cover each square in a thin round of the marzipan.  You can then smooth the marzipan out which will simultaneously smooth the chocolate underneath. Top with the other half.  You could also put a little chocolate on this half too if you’d like, but it is not necessary, they should hold together anyway. 

Good quality white chocolate looks tan or custard colored because of the high cocoa butter content. The cheaper bars are lighter in color because a lot of the cocoa butter is replaced with sugar, milk products and fats.

Recipe Source: http://wildish.kelly-day.com/http:/wildish.kelly-day.com/2010/09/06/lemon-sandwich-cookies-filled-with-white-chocolate-and-marzipan/