Tag: cookies

Almond treats…

The current situation is forcing us to work from home, and there are a few minor changes in our daily activities but in the meantime I don’t feel it affects us that much. One thing though has been a bit annoying, is the closure of our tennis courts in Isumi since the beginning of February. As I believe there is a season for everything, the season for surfing for me has not yet started: the ocean is yet too cold and the weather too, we are not equipped for cold water and I don’t feel like going for a dip in the ocean at the moment. Gardening kept us busy outdoors, but not enough to really free our busy minds. So one day we decided to go for a bicycle ride and just loved it, so we upgraded our foldable tiny bicycles to proper bicycles and we took on riding. Every Saturday and Sunday we go for a 25km ride in the neighborhood and run some errands… Riding, even for only 90min, makes us very hungry. And with the weather doing ups and downs having a few sweets in the pantry is not a bad idea!!! Not to mention that I forgot to refill our chocolate cabinet on an Easter weekend… oups… what was I thinking??? So I decided to prepare some financiers, A. loves them. (Well what is it he doesn’t like when it comes to sweets and treats? ;))

The problem is that financiers recipe uses only the egg whites, so I was wondering what to with the yolks, and found the recipe of helenettes, an other almond based treat that uses only the yolks. Basically the same ingredients as financiers one has the egg yolk, the other the egg white!! Both are really super easy to prepare and very quick! So was I preparing both and baking both and making every body very happy!

While I have been making financiers for a long long time, it was my first time making helenettes and even more, hearing about this little cookie so I was preparing them in a very simple manner, following almost blindly the recipe I found there (in French), I only changed very slightly. So here are my recipes of helenettes and financiers.

Helenettes (15-20 pieces 3cm each)

– 2 egg yolks
– 100g of flour
– 100g of almond powder
– 80g of sugar
– 60g of butter

Melt the butter. In a bowl mix the egg yolks and the sugar. Add the butter, stir well. Add the flour and the almond powder and stir well. Knead a little and make balls of 20g each and slightly flatten them. Set on a sheet of cooking paper and bake for 10 min at 200deg. Don’t over cook them, they will lose there softness and become really hard.

Finish with a bit of icing sugar if you want to make them really beautiful!

Financiers (25 tiny pieces)

– 40g of almond powder
– 50g of butter
– 20g of flour
– 75g of icing sugar
– 2 egg whites

Melt the butter. In a bowl mix the flour, the almond powder and the sugar. Add the egg white one after the other and stir well. Finally add the butter and stir well. If you have financiers molds this is perfect (I have very tiny ones), if you use paper molds be careful not to fill them too much as they might collapse. Fill half to 2/3 of the molds and bake at 240deg for 5 minutes then decrease the temperature to 180 and bake for another 10min. The smaller the shorter, if you use large molds, it may take a bit more time. They must be golden, but not over cooked neither undercooked.

Et voila! Have a good week!
The next almond treats are going to be some Maltese sweets… coming soon! Stay tuned!

Cookies!

OK! I got it right now! The recipe of the sweet and soft cookies a la mode Laura Todd. My second trial was the right one! The official recipe is here, but shush! don’t tell A. I slightly changed it! I actually had to because the original recipe is for 375g of flour and 1 egg and I used half, but still put one egg…

Soft cookies (makes about 15 large cookies or 25-30 small ones)

– 180g of flour

– 120g of brown sugar

– 110g of butter

– 1 small egg

– 1tsp of baking powder

– a pinch of salt

– 1 vanilla bean

– 175g of white/milk/dark chocolate chips (large on is better)

– a handful of walnuts/shredded coconut/hazelnut or nothing…

I melt the butter, and mix it with the sugar and the vanilla, add the egg (actually you can change the order, or add the egg at the very end of the overall recipe, it doesn’t matter!!).

In another bowl, I mix the flour, the baking powder and the salt. If you plan to make only one kind of cookies add here the chocolate chips and the nuts. If you are planning on making different combinations then wait before adding the chocolate chips and the nuts.

Mix the flour mix in the sugar-butter-egg mix and stir well. If you haven’t added the chocolate chips and the nuts you can now split the dough and add them.

Preheat your oven at 140deg. On a greased sheet or cooking paper make small balls of dough (slightly smaller than a ping pong balls). Plan enough space between two as they will become 7-8cm cookies once in the oven. That would be the large cookies. If you want to make smaller ones just reduce the size of the balls by a third or a half.

Bake in the middle of the oven, to obtain an even top-down baking for 15min for the small ones, 18min for the larger ones. (That was one of my failures the first time I tried, they were too low, the bottom dried). Take them out of the oven before the edges start to golden. Let them cool down a bit before moving them.

They were just perfect!

Angst

Today I was reading some articles and stumbled upon the word “angst”. If I understood the general meaning so that my reading wasn’t impeded, I still wanted a clear definition. It’s not hard to search and find the answer and I started immediately to like this word very much, it described so well what I often feel and the awkward position I feel I am in. Enough to make it the title of this post. I feel angst in particular about the so many questions to which I cannot find answers… of course growth has been a long time one, urbanism too, more recently it was about legacy, heredity and filial pity…

All these questions of course don’t prevent from cooking and from experimenting new recipes. When I was a child Laura Todd cookies opened a shop in Aix en Provence. I loved these cookies very much but the shop didn’t last long and soon replaced by a pizza shop… I was surprised in 1999 to discover a decade after that there was a shop in Paris nearby our house (shop that since then as closed too). A. and I would go there once in a while to buy a cookie. A. loved them even more than I did. Laura Todd cookies are very soft but not oily with always melting chocolate chips of a very generous size. A while ago he asked me to make some cookies that would ressemble that. I didn’t try right away, but finally did and made white chocolate chips cookies and raisin cookies. And it worked out very fine. I prepared a recipe in between cookies and scones. Now I just found that Laura Todd cookies recipe is online on their website… (in French) so now I need to try it!!!

I’ll let you know soon how it is and if it is better than my recipe!

Have a great week… mine is busy and lonely…

Almond sables

When there are so many delicious fruits to eat it’s nice to have a few biscuits to go with. Usually with summer fruits I like to prepare simple sablés. This time: almond sablés with a recipe I found browsing some magazines online. The sugar sprinkles really attracted me because I had some I use for frosting some time ago and it needed to be finished before the rainy season makes it unusable. So I went for it… and it was much much better than anything I expected. So here is the recipe.

Almond sablés for 30 bite-size pieces

– 140g of flour

– 100g of butter (at room temperature makes it easier to knead)

– 60g of almond powder

– 30g of sugar

– a bit of icing sugar for the finish

Mix all the ingredients (but the icing sugar) together to obtain a smooth dough. Pull chucks and make small balls that you gently squeeze into a flat and thick coins and arrange on a baking plate greased or with cooking paper. Bake for 15 to 20 min at 160 deg. Sprinkle icing sugar… it’s ready to enjoy!!!

Yuzu-choco cookies

Sudden rainy and chilly days, after some really warm and sunny weeks call for some sweetness… and since we’ve recently planted a yuzu (and also a lemon) tree in the garden, to broaden our range of homemade citrus fruits, I’ve started to harvest a few yuzu fruits. It’s late for the yuzu season but they are none the less delicious and juicy. That’s how the idea of making yuzu cookies came from. The recipe I used for my cookies is rater simple, and you can add whatever pleases you inside.

So here is my yuzu-cholate cookies recipe. If you cannot find fresh yuzu, you can replace by dry yuzu peels rehydrated, or orange.

Yuzu-chocolate cookies

– 110g of butter (at room temperature)

– 150g of flour

– 40g of sugar

– 1 tea spoon of baking powder

– the juice of 1/2 yuzu and the peel of 1/4 yuzu

– 50g of dark cooking chocolate

– a pinch of salt

Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, add the butter and knead well. Add the yuzu juice, cut the peel in tiny pieces and add. Knead a little more. With a knife cut roughly the chocolate in chunks, add and knead. Keep refrigerated for 20min (or 10min in the freezer). Preheat the oven to 180deg. Make small balls of dough and squeeze them flat on baking paper. Bake until golden or hard enough. Cooking time should ne around 10min but it depends on the actual size and thickness of the cookies.

After baking the cookies until golden at 180 degrees I kept them in a cool dry place before eating them.

Kaya cookies

Still with this coconut milk! It’s incredible how much you can try with just a can! I’ve had some nice tries and some that just didn’t work as they were supposed: coconut milk salted caramels. That’s how I ended up with a sort of kaya instead of the caramels. Delicious, addictive… My kaya is basically coconut milk and caramel that I cook to obtain something a little creamy and brownish. After that I mix flour, baking powder, I used a beat of wheat bran for the texture, a bit of butter and 2tbs of kaya. Stir well and make little coin size cookies that I bake 13min at 170-180deg. Simple and delicious though again the baking kind of weaken the coconut milk flavor.

Apple, vanilla and cinnamon cookies

I love to eat freshly baked and still warm bread, pancakes, brioche or whatever for breakfast, but it is unfortunately not possible every morning. So sometimes I bake in the evening so that we have something ready in the morning. And for that tarts, cakes and cookies are the best. I love the classic mix apple-vanilla-cinnamon, so i made some kind of thick cookies with fresh apples on top for our breakfast. The trick is to have them not too sweet for breakfast, so I mixed the flour with oat bran and just a little of sugar and a little of butter, I added one egg and a little of baking powder, plenty of cinnamon powder and vanilla beans. I then roll the dough to 3mm thick and cut the shapes of the cookies. I peeled the apples and cut the shape too a little smaller and topped the cookies with it. Baked them at 170deg for 20min. And added a little of vanilla on top. Simple and perfect anytime of the day actually!

Chai butter cookies

Nothing better after a day outside than hot tea and treats. Butter cookies are so delicious, easy to make and bake that they are a great pick!

Recently I am trying to look for the perfect Chai to drink and I think I found a very good one in Cape Town, unfortunately it’s a bit difficult for refill. After trying Starbucks (too blend), Pukka (too much cinnamon), Marks & Spencer… I think my favorite is M&S! I’m also trying to make my own Chai with soya milk and spices, not bad but needs some more research.
All this to say that since I have all the spices on the shelf I made some Chai butter cookies. Using the recipe in last week post, I added grinded cinnamon, fresh grinded ginger, cardamom seeds to the dough. And as the plum blossom season is at its peak I shaped the dough in plum flowers with a shape bought in Kappabashi dori.

Stamped butter cookies

For my birthday, my best friend offered me a very nice present: a customizable cookie stamp. I’ve used it a few time already for tea and we ate the cookies right of the oven so didn’t had a chance to take a pic!!! This time I made some for dessert and I could keep them long enough to take a picture!! These are plain butter cookies, a bit like Britany’s specialty.

The recipe is really simple: 100g of butter,  150g of flour, 40g of sugar, baking powder, salt, vanilla. Of course you can make any variation of your choice!

After baking the cookies until golden at 180 degrees I kept them in a cool dry place before eating them.

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