Tuesdays with Dorie: Biscuits Rose

In her book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple, Dorie tells us that these cookies have been made since the seventeenth century, starting in France's Champagne region. She describes that the recipe is successful due to various "drying" processes such as adding sugar to egg whites and yolks and, also, by baking them twice like biscotti (once traditionally and secondly by leaving them to dehydrate in the cooling oven after baking). Traditionally, these are a rosy pink but I did not add food coloring. 

This week's recipe was a little intimidating, although I'm not sure why. I read through the recipe several times and prepped the different components and the piping bag. Given the small quantity of ingredients, it probably would have been more effective to use a smaller bowl and a handheld mixer but I only have a standing mixer so I made it work. Once I had folded the egg whites with the egg yolks and started adding the dry ingredients, it was interesting how the batter kept changing in texture, from fluffy to sticky to lumpy to a bit gluey. By the time the ingredients were combined, it reminded me of something between choux pastry and spaetzle batter. I didn't expect it to be thin enough to run out of the pastry bag but I made it work, using the one inch marks on the parchment paper. The piping was a little inexact, but the powdered sugar covered many of my sins. 

By the time I put the cookies in the oven, I was concerned that they would not puff up. They looked very deflated and thin on the cookie sheet. When I turned the cookies at the halfway point, I felt more confident that I would get something fairly close to Dorie's photos. Like Mardi, I got 15 cookies from this recipe. 

The finished cookies have a really unique and interesting texture (in a good way), sort of crunchy and airy but not hard like some biscotti can be. I liked the crispness of the narrower cookies but the wider ones were slightly bready.  Overall, I enjoyed their simplicity and vanilla flavor.

 

To see the successes of my fellow Tuesdays with Dorie bakers, see the Tuesdays with Dorie LYL posts for links.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Marbled Cheesecake

 I am away for spring break this week so I will make my post brief.

This week, I made the marbled cheesecake recipe.  Cheesecake has been one of my signature desserts, so I was curious to try a different recipe.  Since there are just three of us and we would be traveling, I made a 6" cake with a half recipe of batter.

I was surprised to see that there was espresso powder in the crust and the chocolate portion of the batter.  I usually eyeball the butter to crumbs ratio for the crust but it was much more sensible to follow Dorie's proportions. I was also glad to see her note that there is always water that creeps into the foil sleeve.  I thought it was just me.

I looked at other recipes to decide whether to adjust the baking time for the smaller cake. I decided to take it out 10 minutes early but, when I checked it at that point, it was still underbaked.  I baked the half recipe for the amount specified for the full cake and it was perfectly done.

I cut the cake into 8 small slices and it was perfect for each of us to get a few bites here and there with the smaller slices.  The espresso flavor came through and added a nice complexity to the chocolate batter.

Give this one a try from the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple.