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.