La Cure Gourmande, Seville, Spain

La Cure Gourmande has to be on of the sweetest looking shops in Seville, Spain. And, since it is a candy and cookie shop, it is probably one of the sweetest in general. The store is actually a French one, started in 1989 to preserve and share some traditional french recipes for butter cookies, hard candies, caramels, nougats and chocolates. Since the first store opened, there have been over two dozen more, including this location in Seville. The shop is absolutely beautiful, with big displays of sweets that you can buy in artfully designed boxes or pick out one-by-one from bins.

The cookies are fairly expensive and make great gifts for parties and things if you want to get a big tin, but since I only wanted to sample some of the different types, i simply picked them out one at a time to make my own assortment. I ended up with about 10 or 12 cookies in about six different flavors tucked inside a cute paper bag.

The cookies are labeled by flavor, but since most of them are based on the same butter cookie recipe, they look similar when they’re in their case. The flavors I tried included lemon and cinnamon, mixed nut, almond, coconut, vanilla and chocolate-filled. The butter cookie base was very nice, with a subtle butter flavor and a good, slightly crunchy texture. The lemon/cinnamon and almond cookies both were very, very crumbly, to the point where they almost melted in your mouth. The vanilla cookies, pictured below, were a bit like biscotti as they were the crunchiest cookies and well-suited to being dipped in coffee.

The nut cookies, coconut and chocolate were all also excellent, offering a little more variety of flavor than some of the others. The chocolate-filled cookies in particular were delicious, with a smooth, creamy center inside of that crisp butter cookie exterior.