Recipe: Baker Meghan Lethem's coffee and orange alfajores (2024)

Restaurants

"The bakery and the world are changing so quickly," Lethem said.

By Erin Kuschner

April 17, 2020

For Meghan Lethem, head baker at Somerville’s Forge Baking Co., coffee and orange alfajores are a sensory peek into her childhood memories.

“The scent of coffee and oranges is indelibly linked in my memory to being young and visiting my grandparents in Florida,” Lethem shared in an e-mail to Boston.com. “They had citrus trees, and there were always fresh oranges to make into juice in the morning. The coffee would be brewing while we squeezed them, and there is something in the alchemy of the mingled aromas of oranges and coffee that always makes me feel warm and utterly at home.”

While Forge is still open for pickup and delivery — the bakery is offering breads and other baked goods along with Intelligentsia coffee and pantry items — Lethem said that finding balance in production has been a challenge.

“Workaday rhythms have fallen by the wayside, and it’s hard to gauge how much to make [and] how much will sell,” she said.

But the baker, who started at sister cafe Bloc in 2013 before transferring to Forge in 2017, also said that a new rhythm has been found at the bakery. Lethem shared what she’s been doing (besides baking) to keep herself grounded, plus how to make the cookies that take her back to Florida mornings.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

How are you holding up?

Fair to middling? Days have felt uncertain, clouded. There’s a surreal sense akin to grief, the weight of lives lost and lives changed. I’m fortunate, however, to work for two of the finest, most supportive women I’ve known and to work with a group of bakers and front of house staff who have risen to the occasion with great heart. I still get to use my hands to feed my community, and that is enough.

What do you miss most about “business as usual” at the bakery right now?

Our sister cafes — Bloc and Diesel — are closed for now, and I miss their presence. I’m not sure I appreciated before that packing up tubs full of bagels and baguettes to send to them was a form of communication, but now I feel its lack. Bloc is the first cafe I worked at for the company, and it’s the first place I worked where I felt a sense of home-away-from-home. The bakery feels a bit insular these days without our sisters.

When you’re not at the bakery, what have you been doing to keep yourself grounded and busy?

In my free time, I’m embracing idleness. The bakery and the world are changing so quickly, it’s become necessary to allow myself time that is slow and deep. I’ve been revisiting the works of Virginia Woolf; it has been comforting to read someone who writes so intimately and intuitively about time.

What can locals do to help the restaurant industry right now?

The wellbeing of restaurants depends upon the wellbeing of the community. Right now, the most important thing you can do is stay home unless it’s otherwise necessary. Please do what you can to support industry workers who have lost their jobs; many establishments and workers have set up online “tip jars” or donation opportunities. Also, support local food systems over commodity food systems when you can. We rely on the stability of these systems. There are many regional small growers and millers producing beautiful flour that you can buy online (Four Star Farms, Ground Up Grain). Please consider them as sources if you’re exploring baking right now.

What has been a constant in your fridge or pantry as you’ve been cooking and baking more at home?

Vinegar! I’ve made some small batches of quick pickles to extend the life of older produce. It’s also a shelf-stable source of acidity, useful wherever you need a bit of brightness. And bread. Always bread.

Tell us about this recipe.

My hope is that you will have most of these ingredients in your pantry. But the base cookie is a champion, and will taste great with whatever spices you have on hand — cinnamon and ancho chili or black pepper and cardamom would be lovely here. The buckwheat flour isn’t essential; you can definitely sub in the same amount of any whole grain or all-purpose flour. If you don’t have a can of sweetened condensed milk, I stand firmly by the cookie on its own — the dulce de leche is just a bonus.

Coffee and orange alfajores

Yields 30-40 cookies; 15-20 cookie sandwiches

Ingredients:

For the dulce de leche:
1 can (14 oz.) sweetened condensed milk

For the coffee and orange cookies:
1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/4 cup powdered sugar
1 egg yolk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 teaspoon finely ground coffee
Zest of one orange
Pinch of fine salt
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
2/3 cups buckwheat flour

Directions:

For the dulce de leche:
Prepare the dulce de leche well ahead of time. Preheat oven to 425 F. Pour sweetened condensed milk into a (preferably clear) pie tin or ramekin and cover with foil. Set the tin in a larger, deeper pan and fill with water, so that the water level is above that of the condensed milk. Bake for 1.5 hours, until it’s a dark golden brown. Check on it intermittently for color, and top off the water if it starts to dip below the level of the condensed milk. Remove from oven, and let cool completely in the fridge before using.

For the cookies:
Cream the butter until it gets light and fluffy — it should look a bit paler in color than when you began, and look a bit aerated, like whipped cream. You can do this in a mixer or by hand. Sift in the powdered sugar and beat again until the sugar is fully incorporated, and the mixture regains its fluffy quality. Add the egg yolk and beat until it’s incorporated and the mixture looks nice and fluffy. Mix in the vanilla, orange zest, coffee grounds, and salt. Finally, mix in the flours until just incorporated. The dough should feel soft, but not sticky, and should be fairly easy to handle. Add a touch more flour if it’s feeling sticky.

Roll the dough into logs in plastic wrap. They can be as large or small as you like (I prefer a generous cookie and generally shape around 2 1/2 inches diameter, but 1 1/2 inches is more reasonable). Chill in the fridge until the log is solid.

Preheat oven to 350 F. Slice the chilled log of dough into 1/4-inch slices and place on a parchment-lined sheet tray, leaving a generous inch or so between cookies.Bake for 10-12 minutes, rotating your tray at the halfway point. They’re ready when the edges just begin to take on a golden brown color, and the centers begin to lightly brown.

When the cookies are completely cool, spread a bit of your cooled dulce de leche on the bottom of one, and sandwich a second cookie on the top.