Friday 7 December 2012

Day 5: Tuiles

These cookies are making their way from Annapolis Royal to the Bridgetown Library. They were baked by Dorothy MacDonald, the branch manager in Annapolis Royal. The recipe is from the book Ultimate Chocolate by Patricia Lousada.


Tuiles:

¾ cup Hazelnuts, toasted (toast in 350 oven for 8 minutes then place nuts on a towel and rub gently to remove skins)

1/3 cup Superfine sugar (if you cannot find Superfine sugar, simply spin granulated sugar in food processor until it is fine consistency)

4 tablespoons lightly salted butter

5 teaspoons cocoa powder

3 tablespoons heavy cream

2 tablespoons rum

2 large egg whites

1/3 cup all-purpose flour

1 oz. Semi-sweet chocolate pieces

1 - Chop a third of the hazelnuts and set aside. Finely grind the remaining nuts and the sugar together.

2 - Cream the butter then stir in the nut/sugar mixture, cocoa, cream and rum. Add the egg whites, stirring only enough to blend. Sift the flour over the mixture and fold in.

3 - Mark four or five circles, 4 ½ inches in diameter, on buttered and floured baking sheets. Put a scant tablespoon of the mixture in the centre of each circle and thinly spread it out with the back of the spoon. Sprinkle with a few pieces of the chopped nuts.

4 - Bake each batch separately in the preheated oven for about 5 minutes or until the edges of the tuiles are just beginning to darken.

5 - Remove the tuiles with a narrow spatula and, working quickly, put them over a rolling pin (or in a cup if you want tuile baskets, or around a metal or paper horn. Set the baking sheet in the open oven to keep the tuiles warm and pliable.

6 - Melt the semisweet chocolate and spoon into a paper piping bag. Pipe patterns of chocolate on the cold and crisp tuiles.

In case you, like me, don't know, Filberts are Hazelnuts (but not all Hazelnuts are Filberts!!)

From Dorothy:
Well, these looked so pretty in the book, and I figured you can't go wrong with nuts, chocolate and rum, but mine certainly did not turn out looking like the ones the pros did for the book!! And I didn't end up with 16 usable cookies. Many cracked and fell apart ;( I just hope they taste better than they look!! Oh, and the part about gently rubbing the nuts to remove the skins...that didn't work well at all!!


Merry Christmas to all!!

1 comment:

  1. Here's the thing ... we had book club today at the Bridgetown Library, with a guest, no less, a friend of Nancy Kopoulos, author of The Long Bridge, the book under discussion. I'd been thinking the night before that I really should drag my tired old self into the kitchen and make something, but it's been one of those weeks and no matter how hard I tried to talk myself into it, my legs refused to move off the couch. Just imagine what a wonderful surprise it was to find those cookies waiting for me at the library! Dorothy, you are an angel. And by the way, they were absolutely delicious. Thank you so much. - posted by grateful Connie

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