Sandbakkelse Sand Tarts

Mardi Gras season had begun — in Louisiana the whole period from Twelfth Night through Fat Tuesday is a season with its own logic and its own food traditions, and even though Scotlandville Magnet kept its academic pace through all of it, the world outside the school doors had gone festive. I could hear the distant rhythm of a school band practicing a few blocks away on my walk to the bus stop each morning.

The Robinson family Mardi Gras tradition is to go to the North Boulevard parade on Saturday and then eat king cake for dessert until someone wins the plastic baby and is declared responsible for buying the next king cake, which creates a chain that runs sometimes to mid-February. This year I was in the kitchen when Mama cut the king cake that Daddy had brought from a bakery on Plank Road and I felt the plastic baby come through the slice on my plate immediately. I declared myself the winner. MawMaw said the winner is actually the person who finds the baby without biting down on it and destroying their dental work. I said that was revisionist and she laughed.

The bigger food event of the week was making my first king cake from scratch. I had been wanting to do this for two years and I finally committed. The dough is a rich brioche-adjacent thing, yellow from eggs, wrapped in a spiral around a cinnamon-sugar filling. The challenge is the icing: a thin glaze over which you sprinkle the Mardi Gras colors — purple, green, gold. I made it Sunday morning and shaped it into an oval ring and let it rise for an hour and baked it and iced it and stood back and looked at it with genuine satisfaction. It tasted like something from a real bakery. It was mine. I brought half of it to school Monday and Marcus declared it the best Mardi Gras thing he had eaten since birth, which I am counting as a reliable data point.

Once you spend a Sunday morning shaping dough, watching it rise, and pulling something genuinely beautiful out of your own oven, you don’t really want to stop. The king cake gave me that feeling — that particular satisfaction of making something from scratch that actually works — and I started looking for what to bake next. Sandbakkelse Sand Tarts caught my attention because they’re the kind of delicate, buttery cookie that looks like it came from a bakery shelf but is completely doable at home, which is exactly the energy I was in after that Sunday. MawMaw also said she used to make them for church socials, so there’s a tradition argument too.

Prep Time: 25 min | Cook Time: 12 min | Total Time: 37 min | Servings: 36 cookies

Ingredients

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon pure almond extract
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt

Instructions

Cream the butter and sugar. Beat softened butter and granulated sugar together in a large bowl with a hand mixer or stand mixer on medium speed for 2–3 minutes until light and fluffy.
Add egg and extracts. Mix in the egg, almond extract, and vanilla extract until fully combined, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.
Incorporate the flour. Add flour and salt and mix on low speed just until the dough comes together and is smooth. Do not overmix. The dough will be firm but pliable.
Chill the dough. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour, or up to overnight. Chilling makes the dough easier to press into molds.
Preheat and prepare. Preheat oven to 350°F. Set out sandbakkelse tins or mini tart molds on a baking sheet. No greasing is needed if the dough has enough butter content.
Press dough into molds. Pinch off a small ball of dough (about 1 tablespoon) and press it evenly into each tin, working from the center outward to create a thin, uniform shell about 1/8-inch thick.
Bake until golden. Bake for 10–13 minutes until the edges are lightly golden and the shells feel set. Watch carefully — these can over-brown quickly.
Cool and unmold. Let the tins cool on a wire rack for 5 minutes, then gently tap or press to release the shells. They will crisp up further as they cool completely.
Serve or store. Serve plain, dusted with powdered sugar, or filled with a small spoonful of jam or whipped cream. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to one week.

Nutrition (per serving)

Sandbakkelse Sand Tarts — When You Catch the Baking Bug at Mardi Gras