Carrot and Coconut Polvorones

It’s Foodie Pen Pal time again but unfortunately the post man appears to have done a runner with my parcel! To be honest if I knew I was delivering a box of wonderful delicious delights I may well intercept it too. But hopefully it will turn up sooner or later and I won’t miss out on receiving a mystery food package this month.

In the mean time I thought I would post a recipe for the biscuits that I sent to my pen pal Kimberley who has a lovely blog, Full As An Egg, which you should check out. Kimberley was pretty happy in receiving just about anything so I sent her quite a mash up of a package with lots of unrelated bits and pieces. The parcel included a little box of homemade carrot and coconut polvorones. I’ve never actually eaten a polvoron but apparently it is Spanish shortbread style biscuit that usually contains some form of nut. These little biscuits are covered in a generous dusting of icing sugar, hence the name as polvo is the Spanish word for dust or powder (you learn something new every day!). But I had seen a couple of recipes online for these continental treats and ended up amalgamating a number of these recipes to create a vegan version of the polvoron. Since I have never had a proper Spanish polvoron I am not too sure how authentic these are but they tasted great and Kimberley enjoyed them too!

INGREDIENTS

120ml coconut oil

150g raw carrot (peeled and sliced into medium chunks)

110g caster sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 ½ teaspoons ground ginger

45g desiccated coconut

45g ground almonds

250g plain flour

Icing sugar

Makes approx. 25

Pre-heat the oven to 180°C / 350°F

Begin by boiling the carrot in a small pan of water until tender. Once cooked drain the carrots and allow to cool before blitzing in a blender to form a smooth puree.

Mix the oil, carrot puree, sugar and spices together in a large mixing bowl with a wooden spoon.

Gradually add the coconut, almond and flour to the wet ingredients until everything is well and comes together into one large ball.

Take small sections of the mixture and roll into balls. Place each ball on a baking tray lines with non-stick baking parchment and press each ball down lightly to flatten slightly (don’t squash the balls of mixture down too much, these biscuits should resemble little domes more than flat discs).

Bake in the oven for 15 minutes until lightly golden in colour.

Transfer the biscuits to a cooling rack and allow to cool completely.

Once cooled the biscuits need to be covered with icing sugar. I achieved a good even coating by taking a small Tupperware container and placing approx. ½ cup of icing sugar into this container. I then placed small batches of biscuits into the container and sealed the lid on before rotating the tub a couple of times until the biscuits were completely coated with the sugar. I repeated this process until all of the biscuits were fully dusted!