And so, book in hand, I embarked on one of my most difficult baking feats yet. It starts right away with the list of not all that common ingredients, like almond flour and Dutch process cocoa. While I'd never been able to find these things before, I headed to Whole Foods with a positive outlook... and with a sharp eye in the baking aisle, I found what I needed. By the way, almond flour is ridiculously expensive. It's $10 for about 4 cups! But I couldn't risk not getting the good stuff and having my cookies be a complete flop.
You'll have to get the book if you want the recipe... being in publishing makes me a little bit of a stickler about infringing on those copyright laws (and hey, I like getting paid), but I'll take you through my struggles. The recipe begins easily enough with mixing together the dry ingredients. So you have this nice, big bowl of finely sifted dry ingredients, and you're supposed to stir egg whites into it. Now I wasn't quite sure how this would work, so I scrambled my egg whites just slightly, afraid they shouldn't really be scrambled but also afraid they wouldn't mix well with the dry ingredients if left to their own devices. I added the little bit of egg whites to the pile of dry ingredients and stirred and stirred.
Until I came up with this:
And now I had this thick, heavy dough that I was supposed to fold a meringue into. I stared at the dough, thought about meringue, thought about the folding process... my final conclusion: not going to happen. But I set a pot of sugar and water on the stove to boil anyways and turned the Kitchen Aid on to whip up the egg whites. Once the sugar water was hot enough (and I must disclose I do not own a candy thermometer so I went with what I thought would work), I poured it slowly into the egg whites. Then I probably left the Kitchen Aid running for another 10 to 15 minutes because the bowl must be cool to the touch before the meringue is considered done.
At that point I began folding the meringue into the thick dough, a little at a time. I used the first bit of meringue to soften the dough and probably did a little more than folding in order to get the dough to be more pliable and workable.
Eventually, I combined all of the meringue with the dough and ended up with a very light mixture.
You would think things couldn't get any more complicated, but this was the more difficult, and quite messy, part: I had to scoop the dough into a bag so I could pipe the cookies out onto a sheet pan. My first cookies did not look so pretty. But I got the hang of it after that and even switched to making teeny tiny cookies, as is my trademark. And also, I had a teeny tiny macaron at Olives, and I wanted to see if I could replicate it.
I used three sheet pans lined with parchment paper. I had all of my cookies piped and ready to go, but they need to sit that way for 15 minutes because that resting time is supposedly what gives them that shiny exterior and perfect crunch. Once they had rested it was time for the baking ritual, and I do mean ritual. Set the oven to 400, put the cookies in, turn the oven off, bake for 5 minutes, turn the oven back on 400, bake for 8 more minutes, which in my oven was anywhere from 3 to 6 minutes. I burnt a few batches trying to get all the timing right, but I finally had a system down. Somehow though, the recipe said the yield would be 50 macarons, I had that many in the first 4 trays. I don't know how I lasted the next 4 hours putting pans in the oven, taking them out, adjusting the oven temp, setting and resetting the timer...
Somehow in the midst of all of that, I made the chocolate ganache filling. It had to rest for about an hour to be the right consistency to pipe it on the cookies, so I figured I should get that done while the cookies were still going, so it wouldn't be midnight before I could fill them. The ganache is simply two different chocolates, some corn syrup, and heavy cream.
The finished, unfilled cookies:
And this is about how much filling I piped onto them. Once you sandwich the cookies, you can flatten the filling down to cover the whole surface.
And 5 hours later... the finished product:
And my minis:
While the cookies did not come out as fluffy as I would have liked, they were crisp on the outside and chewy in the middles, and the ganache was just luscious. I brought a bunch to work where they were well-received, some to my boyfriend who was not a fan of the ganache, and I put a bunch in the freezer for some future party or occasion.
When I recover from making these, I would like to try some different flavors and fillings, but that won't be for a while. If you're going down this route, you have to be very ambitious and set aside a lot of your time.
I have a feeling I'm going to need this book next.
2 comments:
Yum! I'm so sad I missed these. I had some lovely ones in Paris. The flavors were coffee, pistachio, raspberry (with jam filling), and lemon -- if that inspires you at all. Although now that I see how much work goes into them, I can't imagine making multiple flavors at one time!
Yep, the process is kinda difficult and messy, but when it turned out perfectly, it is heaven! Very fun to make, too!
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