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| Peanut butter and cassis |
This next weekend brought some unseasonably warm weather and we were also in the throes of Girl Scout cookie season. Our neighborhood diner had a set of inspired specials incorporating cookies from a local troop. One of the specials was essentially a donut covered in samoa frosting, drizzled with chocolate, and topped with, you guessed it, a samoa cookie. Another special was an adult milkshake composed of ice cream blended with peanut butter patties and topped with a kir whipped cream; I'm sure there was some sort of other alcohol in there. We took advantage of the weather to meander over to the diner with some friends and indulge in some delightful cookie-inspired treats.
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Adventures in madeleine equipment.
Metal on top, sad silicone on bottom. |
Feeling inspired, I also decided to try out a couple new varietals of cookies for this week's bakes. First up were some maple madeleines. I'd never made madeleines before, but we did have a couple pans since these are some of JW's favorite cookies. I learned quickly that they are incredibly rich. Once again, I had a slight disadvantage having never eaten a proper madeleine before. There was also some technical glitches: one of the madeleine pans was a traditional metal one, whereas the other pan was constructed of silicone and needed to be placed on a cookie sheet for support in the oven. However, the cookie sheet warped when it was heated, thus causing the mold to be all askew. The heat conduction in the silicone pan also proved to be uneven. So half of the batch were misshapen and unevenly browned. Sad face. I recalled that, years ago, one of my kindred baking spirits experimented at length with canele molds and also discovered the shortcomings of the silicone based ones. Further investigation revealed that the specific metal composition of the madeleine pans are also integral to their success. Armed with all of this knowledge, I wound up replacing the silicone pan. However, this baking snafu proved to be serendipitous as it set off a chain of observations that would later prove invaluable to macaron troubleshooting. More on that later.
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| Green ombre cookie bites! |
The second of the cookie varietals was a green tea ombre cookie from the December cover of Bon Appetit. December 2015, mind you - it was probably about time to get around to it. This took some precision in cutting and layering for uniformity, but the end result was about as pretty as I'd wanted it to be. Perfect for the holidays or any other time that you need to add some pizazz. I'll have to try the raspberry ombre ones, too, sometime.
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