I get a little worried anytime a recipe starts with a line like that. I guess I've never really thought about a cat tongue too much, but eating one doesn't seem like a great idea. It sounds more like some bad Chinese food joke than an actual food. But we're open-minded around here, right?
Since it's been about a month since I've made anything, I spent last weekend making a few recipes. Take a look over to the right if you want a hint at what's coming. These cookies were picked because I had everything I needed to make them on hand. The ingredients were just butter, sugar, salt, vanilla extract, eggs, and flour. That's pretty simple.
I started by adding the butter, sugar, and salt to my mixer. Fitted with the whisk attachment, I creamed the mixture. This took a little while because the quantities were pretty small and the mixer was having some issues scraping all of it together. Eventually it worked out pretty well:
I added in one egg white and the vanilla and mixed it until combined. One more egg white went in and I continued mixing it for just a few more seconds. The last ingredient, the flour, was added in one half at a time and gently folded in.
I put all of the batter into a ziploc bag and placed it into the refrigerator for about half an hour to firm everything up a little bit, but not before giving it a little taste. It essentially tasted like a sugar cookie batter. Kind of plain, but plain in the 'I could eat it all right now' kind of way.
After thirty minutes, I snipped off a corner of the ziploc bag, successfully transforming it into my own personal pastry bag. I piped all of the batter into thin lines with varying levels of success. Here's the better half, piped by my better half.
Each of the two trays went into the oven for 3 minutes at 350 degrees. After the three minutes, I switched and rotated each of the trays and they baked for about five more minutes. Out of the oven came a shorter and wider version of what went in:
They smelled great, so they didn't get too much of an opportunity to cool before they joined a couple of glasses of port and some chocolate as dessert.
These were very easy to make and provided a relatively high level of deliciousness. They probably could of used a few more minutes in the oven to crisp them up just a bit, but overall their value was good. The whole batch lasted for a few days with only a small amount of deterioration in quality. They won't stand on their own as a dessert, but they work great as an accompaniment, like say, with the pot de creme the books recommend. I'm sure we'll see these again around here.
5 comments:
did you have to do anything different than the recipe to factor in the altitude at all?
-erica
Nope, no changes at all. I typically find that the recipes bake much faster, but I think this was too short of a cooking time to really notice a difference.
I think I'll try these next time I need something like sweet and simple. If I make this quantity, I'll use my hand mixer to avoid the stop-and-scrape issue.
Claire @ http://culinary-colorado.blogspot.com
These look great. I have the Bouchon cookbook, but the only thing I've made from it is the french onion soup.
Claire,
A hand mixer would have been great. I thought about it about 30 seconds too late, but that's a definite for next time.
Sara,
Thanks for reading. It's a great book, and a lot of it is fairly easy. Give it a try. It can't take longer than the onion soup, that's for sure!
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