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Confidential to KitchenMage:  I have found the answer.  It is here. 

I have decided, dear friends, that the most beautiful phrase in the English language is gevulde koeken.  Of course, when I said this to Lloyd, he pointed out that gevulde koeken is actually Dutch, not English.  He's so helpful, that Lloyd.

Let's try this again:  The most beautiful phrase in the English language is almond paste sandwich cookies, not only because they are beautiful (which they are), nor because they taste like heaven made manifest (which they do), but because they are surprisingly easy to put together.  I had my doubts.  Although these are called sandwich cookies, they bear less resemblance to what most Americans consider sandwich cookies -- Oreos, Mint Milanos or, heaven forfend, SnackWells -- and more resemblance to little filled pastries.  The pastry itself is rather like pie dough, albeit with more butter, more sugar and less liquid.  Unlike most pastry recipes with which I work a lot, in this one the sugar is added after the butter has been cut into the flour, so the finished dough has a bit of a sandy texture, even if you use a fine-grain sugar like caster sugar.  All of the usual rules of pastry apply here:  use a light hand, keep everything as cool as you can, dust your work surface with enough flour to keep everything from sticking, don't panic.

I did find myself on the gauzy edge of panic, though.  I didn't have the right size or shape cutter for which the recipe called.  The dough crumbled, and continued to crumble until I bit the bullet and kneaded it a bit.  Even though I know that some gluten development is necessary for pastry to hold together, I still have too many years of dire warnings about not kneading pie crust or biscuit dough, lest the gluten get overworked and the dough get too tough.  This time, though, it worked like a charm, and the dough rolled right out.  I lay 15 circles of dough on a baking sheet (more than the 12 specified by the recipe, thanks to my too-small biscuit cutter), lay 15 slightly-smaller-but-still-substantial circles of almond paste (lightened with a bit of egg) on top of the pastry, capped each of the circles with a second set of pastry circles, crimped everything together, tried not to panic when a bit of pastry or almond paste stuck to my hands, brushed them all with an egg wash, topped them with blanched almonds, let them sit out a bit to dry, and then sent them to the oven.  I was sure that the seams would not hold, that the cookies would spread into one giant cookie, that I would have a morass of burned sugar and gooey pastry waiting for me.

I did not.  What I had was a brilliant surprise.  I can't believe that my afternoon of feckless goofing could produce such a wonder of a cookie.  I love these so much that I want to stay home and bake them for a solid month.  In hindsight, I should not be surprised, for the recipe came from the much-discussed-on-this-page Windmills in My Oven:  A Book of Dutch Baking by Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra, who has been my baking history hero ever since I bought her book, and now is my baking hero as well.  I hope that she will indulge me one more spate of quoting from Windmills, specifically her headnote for gevulde koeken:

These delicious biscuits have got to be the nation's Number One Bestseller and, tragically, this popularity is dangerously close to destroying them.  Everybody makes them:  the local baker at the corner, the market baker and the biscuit manufacturer, hence the quality of the ingredients varies greatly, with cheap pulses or apricot kernels replacing the almonds in the filling and margarine the butter in the pastry.  Even more people sell them; you can buy them loose or prepackaged, even individually packaged, from the baker, the supermarket, the railway station restaurant and the school canteen.  Often, the name is the only common characteristic.  This recipe is for the genuine article, pure and simple.

She's right.  These are the genuine article, pure and simple, crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside, the purest essence of almond throughout.  They would almost make a body cry, except that crying tends to interfere with eating, and you really should eat these, not cry over them.