We made some cookies at work the other day that were so insanely delicious, I had to repeat the recipe at home too, for us to have with tea. They come from Michel Bras’ fabulous dessert book, from which I also rediscovered my love for Le Pain aux Epices.

I love recipes that have the ability to surprise. When I saw the word tuiles (which means tiles, in French), I thought, here’s yet another recipe for those ubiquitous wafers you see so often as garnishes on desserts. Not that they aren’t tasty, but I didn’t think I would gain anything from trying this recipe out. How wrong I was! These are lovely when made into thin, delicate shapes, but I also like them thicker like roofing tiles, spicy, and with a bit of a laissez-faire look to them.

They remind me of the plate-sized almond tuiles we saw being sold in various Parisian bakeries when B and I were there on holiday. Those were beautiful curved golden discs, flecked with sliced almonds, and stacked one on top of the other. I would have bought one for sure, if I hadn’t been so distracted by the cakes, croissants and baguettes that we consumed so much of.

Michel Bras recommends having some of these cookies on hand, “.. to console a child with a boo-boo, a stressed adult, [or] to offer as an expected treat to guests.” It is also good to note that the cocoa version is gluten/flour free. These sugary treats certainly appealled unexpectedly to this sometimes-stressed adult with the occasional boo-boo!

If that alone is not enough to convince you, I have also been indulging in some lily-gilding, by turning them into waffle-esque ice-cream cones! These were filled with hazelnut ice-cream, chocolate sauce spiked with coffee liqueur and chopped peanuts. My version of the chocolate Cornetto. 🙂

Tuile Cookies :
(from The Notebooks of Michel Bras by Michel Bras)

Cocoa Tuiles
200g sugar
30g cocoa powder
100g melted butter
75g egg whites

Combine the sugar, cocoa powder, and melted butter. Blend thoroughly. Add the egg whites. Allow to rest for 1 hour. Stir gently before using.

Line a baking sheet with buttered parchment. Make 8cm rounds with a pastry brush or with your index and middle fingers. Bake in a preheated 180’C oven until golden. If you overbake them, they will be too brittle to shape; if underbaked, they’ll be too soft. If you do not shape them immediately, you can reheat them in the oven later. When you remove them from the oven, shape them around a bottle or a rolling pin. You can also roll them into a cigarette shape by wrapping them around the handle of a spatula or wooden spoon.

Store in a tightly sealed container with a silica-gel packet.

Honey and Anise Tuiles
75g honey
75g icing sugar
60g melted butter
100g egg whites
70g sifted flour
anise seed

Combine the honey, icing sugar, melted butter, and egg whites. Blend thoroughly and add the flour. Allow to rest for 1 hour. Stir gently before using. When you form the tuiles, dust them with a few anise seeds. (Baking method as above)

After a long and involved working week, I was feeling a little hysterical from exhaustion and had promptly sworn off any type of kitchen activity during my mid-week weekend. Afterall, there was also that long-standing To Do list to consider as well : Get a haircut, buy wood chips for smoking chocolate, treat myself to some Winter shopping, reread Laurie Colwin, watch The Wire.

However, once I had a good sleep, I was itching the next day to get stuck into fulfilling my promise to cook some freezer meals for B. For the rest of the week, he now has chicken curry, mushroom and barley risotto and chunky pumpkin, chorizo and tomato stew options, all arranged tetris-like in our tiny freezer.

I never did get round to buying wood chips though, so that’s one thing I can’t scratch off the To Do list. Not only that, but my favourite hairdresser is still overseas touring Europe with his brother, and as for shopping? Well, these days, my piglet toes tend to squeal in anything more involved than work clogs or sneakers. A sad prospect, for the fancy heels I have long coveted and a sad future, for the ones I have acquired, now left dwindling in shoe boxes and cloth bags, during what should be the prime of their partying life (and don’t get me started on my collection of handbags!). I didn’t even manage to find The Wire amongst our collection to watch, but I did get started on Laurie Colwin, which made me want to cook even more.

Back into the kitchen I went, to play around with an idea that had been simmering around in my mind. It was originally about chocolate and peanuts, but I couldn’t resist throwing a bunch of organic bananas into the mix as well. What resulted was : milk chocolate and peanut butter mousse, banana custard wafers, peanut cookies, peanut powder and peanut milk.

The banana custard wafer had some cocoa spots on it, in an attempt to mimic the look of banana skin (it probably didn’t really convince, but hey, it’s my kitchen, I’ll do what I want! – Can you just imagine Eric Cartman saying that if he ever became a Chef?). I shaped the peanut cookies to look like the halved peanuts that I also used as a garnish. The cookies are an adaptation of Alice Medrich’s Sesame Coins. If you love the flavour of sesame and tahini paste, you absolutely must try her recipe. Like their sesame counterparts, the peanut cookies were incredibly tender and so melt-in-your-mouth it was like putting a teaspoon of pure peanut butter in your mouth (without that overly cloying feeling).

The end result was by no means a perfect dish. It could do with a little more tweaking, admittedly, but unfortunately I have already mentally moved on from it, so it will have to stay in the back burner for the time being.

Since the above dessert was a one-plate wonder, I gathered the leftover ingredients and made a batch of sticky banana and chocolate puddings to have with warm custard this evening. Baking puddings are a cinch. Anyone should try their hand at them, especially now the chill has descended upon us and nothing will really do after dinner except for a hot cup of tea and a bowl of pudding. Even when you are the type who usually has nothing but a bottle of white wine and a bar of chocolate in your fridge (to paraphrase Laurie Colwin), the bottle doubles as a handy rolling pin substitute (for pastry puddings) and the chocolate can be consumed when the frustration of baking gets too much to handle.

This is a boldly moist pudding that should be served with any of the following pudding weapons, which are guaranteed to conquer even the most outrageously sized puddings : custard, cream, ice-cream or toffee sauce. It is for all those occasions when life is too short for anything but.

Anyone else in the southern hemisphere feel like having pudding these past days? I urge you to whip out your dariole moulds, and trusty recipes. To serve, unmould the warm pudding, and top with your weapon of choice.

Given my obsessions for all things ice-creamy and biscuitty, I’m surprised that it’s taken me this long to catch on to the whole business about ice-cream sandwiches. Then again, it did take me just about as long to make the transition from cassette tapes to CDs. My first ever CD purchase was Radiohead’s The Bends, but prior to that, I had a little tape collection that was very dear to me (the first tape I ever owned was NKOTB’s Hangin’ Tough, but you really didn’t need to know that, did you!).

So now that I’m firmly entrenched in the ice-cream sandwich fanclub, I’ve been exploring different sandwich materials, such as macarons, shortbread biscuits, and now brownies. From Michael Recchiuti’s book, Chocolate Obsession, I discovered a chocolate brownie sandwich recipe which involved spreading the brownie batter thinly onto baking trays. Once baked, ice-cream (Michael suggests roasted banana ice-cream, which sounds divine) is spread across the thin slabs of brownie and sandwiched. These are frozen until firm then sliced into squares. A delightfully schmaltzy and sweet snack.. which reminds me of the second ever tape I owned, but I don’t think I’ll embarrass myself further by telling you what it was!

As I didn’t have enough ice-cream to make a full slab, I made a half slab and filled the other sheet of brownie with a chocolate salted caramel mixture, sprinkled with Fleur de Sel de Guérande. Once cut (as pictured above), these became a little present for B and his workmates, who by default have become my some-time pastry guinea pigs. 🙂

(But wait, there’s more..)

I wish I hadn’t eaten so many of those ice-cream sandwiches, because I had only one left to play with by the time I got inspired to try something different. This meant that I didn’t really manage to get a photo of the dish that I was completely happy with, but oh well. I recently saw a recipe for ‘ice powder galaktoboureko’ in the Press Club cookbook and wanted to try it out, but with coconut instead of normal milk. This got me thinking about lamingtons and with my remaining ice-cream sandwich that sort of looks like an inverse lamington, I thought I could make something involving the flavours of lamington : chocolate, coconut, vanilla.

The coconut ice powder, is really a granita of sorts. It has a hint of custardy-ness to it, because the coconut milk is cooked like an anglaise before being frozen and scraped. On this dish, I also included young coconut flesh and chocolate coconut sauce. In hindsight, I could have also rolled the ice-cream sandwiches in dessicated coconut so that they looked more like lamingtons. Maybe next time!

Also, when I next have some free time, I hope to try my hand at smoking some chocolate (hmm.. I wonder if my exhaust fan will be able to handle this..) and cobbling together a dish involving peanut : mousse, milk and powder. See you then!