France has many petit-fours, cookies and cakes which originate from the region as well as surrounding provinces, and the palets bretons is one of these. Hailing from Brittany (a province to the NW of France, and which gives the cookie the ‘breton’ part of it’s name), it is a delicate butter cookie which seems barely held together and has a texture unlike any cookie I’ve ever experienced.
Nothing quite like the anticipation of how a new cookie recipe will turn out.
Upon the request of the gorgeous Marie-Laure (also known as Milo), I set out in search of a recipe for these so desired cookies. Whilst I didn’t have much luck myself, the wonderful Cindy found a recipe from a French food blog for these wonders (could it get any more authentic?) which I gave a try, in the hopes that they’d ease Milo’s homesickness with the buttery and sugary goodness they offered.
Milo’s advice - devour these with a mug of hot chocolate, perfect for our cold Melbourne winter nights.
Palets Bretons
Ingredients
4 egg yolks
240g salted butter at room temperature
120g castor sugar
300g plain flour, sifted
Milk, to ‘wash’ the cookies
1. Beat together the egg yolks and castor sugar till light and creamy.
2. Cream the butter then beat into the egg and sugar mix till well-combined.
3. Slowly add the flour, about 1/4 cup at a time, making sure to mix well after each addition.
4. Once all the flour has been incorporated, tip the dough onto a large square of cling wrap and press into a ball shape, then refrigerate for 30 mins.
5. Remove from the fridge then roll into a long, thick sausage. It should be about 5-6cm in diameter. Place back in the refrigerator 1 hour.
6. Preheat oven to 200 degrees C. Use a sharp knife and slice up into rounds about 1-1.5cm thick. (Note from Milo - ‘palets is also a word for hockey puck in French, so that gives you an idea of the size of these cookies).
7. Place rounds on a baking tray lined with baking paper and lightly flatten with the palm of your hand. Give each of the cookies a milk wash, then lightly trace a lattice pattern into each with a fork.
8. Bake for 15-20mins till the top of each cookie looks golden, remove and cool on the tray. Whilst it’s cooling, make yourself a cup of tea/coffee/hot chocolate, then sit down with your drink and a cookie and relax 
Here are the golden little hockey pucks - crisp golden outsides which disintegrate upon the application of pressure, they’re extremely rich and dangerously tasty in a very moreish way.
Technorati Tags: palets bretons, butter cookie, recipe, baking, French cooking
This week’s entry for Weekend Dog Blogging is dedicated to the cuteness of animals being caught on camera with their tongue sticking out. Mr. Woofy will now kindly demonstrate:
Here we have the “45 degree angle half-flip”. See how elegantly the tongue has been extended?
This is better known as the “semi-forward extended thrust”, quite a common move, and one usually followed by the previous display.
Here Mr. Woofy demonstrates the rarely seen “hide and seek” move, you can see why it’s named so in the enlarged image in the bottom right hand side corner. (Edit: No, that’s not a crumb, that’s a tiny bit of his tongue! :P)
I wonder what kind of moves other pretty pooches are pulling this weekend? Check out Sweetnicks on Sunday for round-up #48!
Technorati Tags: golden retrievers, dogs, tongue, weekend dog blogging
I went out on Friday night with my darling girl Vee to catch up with dinner and a movie as I hadn’t seen her in awhile. Now, we usually hang out in Glen Waverley as we both live in Vermont South and it’s the closest place to go for some kind of entertainment. I’ve lived in this area for the last 6 years of my life, and in that time there has been a lot of development - lots of restaurants, cafes and bars which have popped up along one relatively small strip just a bit down from the Glen shopping centre (mall to you Northerners).
There’s just one problem. Since all these restaurants have started appearing, I am yet to find one that I’m happy to eat at and return to.
This week we decided we’d try Michel’s Brasserie And Bar inside the Novotel hotel as it was quite a bit different from the other cheap eats. Unfortunately, I think we would have been better off at any of those cheap eats (not including Airstream Cafe, which some lunatic at The Age said was one of the best cafes in Melbourne) than at this wannabe swish restaurant.
Upon entering, it’s not so bad. They have an inoffensive design theme so long as you ignore the awful swirling carpet, and the service is quite good.
See that horrid carpet?
We placed our orders and received our slightly stale bread and quite salty butter. However, when you’re as hungry as we were, you’ll forgive the breadbasket in anticipation of your meal, in our case, spaghettini with seafood and marinated lamb rump with kipfler potatos and roasted garlic.
In hindsight, we should have ordered more bread.
Spaghettini with mussels, prawns, calamari and fish in a garlic and chilli sauce.
Vee’s order of spaghettini was the first to arrive to the table, and the presentation was fantastic - two large mussels perched atop a dish brimming with goodness from the sea. Unfortunately, those two mussels were the only ones on the plate and though they were extremely fresh and cooked perfectly…there was only two 
The main problem with this dish was simply way, way too much chilli. Now, I’ve been eating chilli dishes since I was a baby (somewhere between the age of 2 and 3), and after trying some of the pasta, I had a mild choking fit. Don’t get me wrong, I love chilli and spicy things, but when the chilli is so strong that it overpowers almost every other flavour that is meant to be in the dish, it’s just too much.
Marinated lamb rump with kipfler potatos, roasted garlic and cherry tomatoes.
My meal arrived to the table not long after the spaghettini, and once again, whilst it looked fairly pretty, it ended up being quite a let-down. The lamb was overcooked (the waitress whisked off without asking how I’d like it cooked), the outside was quite tough and chewy and the inside was dry and tasteless. The tomatoes were hydroponically grown and had virtually no real ‘tomato’ flavour, the potatoes were crisp on the outside and nicely cooked inside, but then we have the garlic. Now, I’ve roasted garlic before, and I can tell you that it’s not a particularly difficult operation. The garlic on my plate were close to, if not, raw. Completely unpeelable and rock hard, after one attempt to get to the inner bulb I just gave up.
After the disappointing dinner, we decided to order some dinner to try and end the meal on a nice note, but really, if dinner was that bad, how could we have expected dessert to be any better?
Blueberry cheesecake with berry salad and cream
Yes folks, they served Vee a small slice of extremely mediocre cheesecake which had just 3 blueberries on top. The little blob of jam on the right hand side is their idea of a berry salad, and I’m not quite sure what they thought they were trying to achieve with the dusting of icing sugar on the strawberry. As for that blue stain on the back of the cheesecake, I’m guessing that’s from whatever box it came out of, but the fact that it was still on the slice that came out is a pretty good indication of how much attention they’re paying to what they serve.
Apple and pear crumble with vanilla ice cream
Crumbles are one of my favourite winter desserts - usually consisting of a nice crumble topping on top of fresh fruit. The fruit was okay, but much too stewed. The main offender in this dessert was the not-so-crumbly crumble topping.
Crumbles exposed - porridge in disguise?
Though the topping looked nice and brown to begin with, once I dug into it with my spoon, it’s true mushy nature was revealed. As you can see by the thing balanced on my spoon, it was a solid layer of sludge and after a few attempts to eat it, I had to stop as it was making me feel extremely ill.
So if you’re eating out in Glen Waverley and decide to go to this restaurant, be warned. It may look all posh-nosh, but you’re better off going to Bob’s kitchen for a decent feed at a much more affordable price.
Technorati Tags: eating out, restaurant, review, novotel, michel’s brasserie and bar, glen waverley
My darling Marie-Laure, a young lass who hails from France and is currently studying in Australia, has been loving the little french petit-fours that I’ve been making her…but after moaning over the macarons, she asked me if I could please make her some ‘palets bretons‘ as she was dearly missing these treats. Apparantly quite similar to sables, but smaller and much thicker, it’s a type of cakey butter cookie which (she says) is fantastic with a glass of hot chocolate.
I’ve tried finding a recipe for these things but I haven’t been able to locate a single one in my cookbooks or on the internet…So, here’s a plea from myself on behalf of the wonderful Marie-Laure - has anyone got a recipe for these elusive ‘palets bretons‘ so I can help bring a taste of France to my homesick hon?
Technorati Tags: palets bretons, cookies, France
I’ve never actually seen, or even tasted a macaroon, but after reading post after post about these beautiful delicacies by many food bloggers I held them in the highest regard as one of the most delightful yet difficult petit fours in the dessert world. Because of the the difficulty rating that everyone seemed to give them, I’d never even thought about attempting them till yesterday.
Well, you can see how well that adventure went.
Call it sheer bloody-mindedness, but yesterday’s failure only strengthened my resolve to beat these meringue-based marvels into submission of the tastiest kind.
I followed these instructions pretty much to the letter
I was unwilling to try the same recipe, so after some googling, I found this recipe at A La Cuisine which I thought I’d give a shot, as, y’know, a real person had actually tried it and not some airy fairy chef. The only point at which I deferred from the instructions was the last bit - I was scared of over-mixing and I didn’t quite get it “flowing like magma”.
Look at those puffy, well-formed feet!
Mmm, macaroon-y goodness!
It worked out fine, except that after the first tray left the oven, I began to have a sneaking suspicion that my oven temperature was off. After they had cooled and I tried to remove them, they could not be pried off the baking paper to save my life. However, with the second tray I left them in much longer and they turned out pretty much spot on, as you can see above 
They are crunchy with a chewy centre, and a beautiful combination of flavour and texture!
Plain macaroon with bittersweet chocolate ganache filling.
I’ve adapted the original recipe ever so slightly as they were far too sweet for my liking (but tasted fine once paired with the creamy, intense, almost bitter dark chocolate ganache) with a few additional notes from my own learning experience today
French Almond Macaron
Ingredients
3/4 cup (150g) pure icing sugar
1 cup (110g) commercial ground almonds (much drier than grinding them yourself)
1/4 cup plus 2 tbsp (105g) egg whites at room temperature*
1/4 cup (65g) castor sugar
pinch of salt
*measure out your egg whites the night before, leaving them out, uncovered, at room temperature to slightly dry out and thicken.
1. Sieve the almond flour and icing sugar seperately, then mix them together and set aside.
2. In a large, clean, dry bowl, whip the egg whites with salt on medium speed till they are foamy. Increase the speed to high and slowly add the castor sugar (1 tbsp at a time), and continue to whip till you have stiff peaks (the whites should be firm and shiny).
3. With a flexible spatula, gently fold in the icing sugar/almond mixture into the egg whites till completely incorporated. The mixture should be shiny and ‘flow like magma’. When small peaks dissolve to a flat surface, stop mixing. Line a heavy baking tray with a silicone baking mat and parchment (the heavy tray and silicone mat are to ensure even heat distribution).
4. Pipe the batter onto baking sheets in 1 inch circles, between 1cm - 1.5cm tall. Firmly tap the baking tray against the tabletop to remove air bubbles, and leave in a dry area of the room to dry out for 1 or 2 hours to allow skins to form. You’ll know that the skin has formed when you can lightly press your finger against the piped form and bring it away clean without a single trace of wetness or stickiness.
5. Bake in an oven preheated to 160 degrees C for roughly 20 minutes with a wooden spoon to prop open the oven door, rotating the tray after 10 minutes for even baking. Keep an eye on them, and once the macaroon can be easily pushed off the parchment, remove them immediately. If they are still sticking to the sheet, they are undercooked.
6. Place the parchment on a cooling rack, and leave to completely cool. Once cool, pair them up with other halves of similar size, then pipe filling onto one half and sandwich them. Refrigerate to allow the fillings to harden and flavours to meld, and remove from refrigerator 20 minutes before serving.
They taste sooooo good!
Flavour & Filling Options
Ordinary Buttercream
100g butter
35g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract (or 1 vanilla bean)
Beat together till well combined, then chill till firm enough to pipe.
or
Italian Buttercream
2 egg whites (60mL)
1/3 cup plus 1 tbsp castor sugar
1/2 cup unsalted butter at room temperature, roughly diced
Whisk together the egg whites and sugar. Set the bowl bain-marie style (over a pot of simmering water) and heat the mixture, whisking often, for 3-5mins or till it feels warm and sugar has dissolved.
Remove from heat and whisk on high speed till stiff and shiny. Add the butter slowly, one cube at a time, and continue to mix till all the butter is combined. Add any flavourings and refrigerate till firm enough to pipe.
or
Bittersweet Chocolate Ganache
Equal parts bittersweet chocolate and cream
Melt bain-marie style, then mix till combined and leave to cool, mixing occasionally.
You can also:
- Mix in 1/4 cup strained strawberry jam into the buttercream.
- Sift in 2 tbsp Dutch-process coca powder with the icing sugar for the macaroon batter.
- Replace part of the almond powder with another nut powder such as hazelnut.
- Scrape seeds from 2 vanilla beans and add to almond meal mix. Add 2 tsp vanilla. extract to butter cream.
- Add 1 tbsp coffee powder to egg whites. Add 1 tsp coffee powder to butter cream.
- Mix pistachio paste into butter cream.
- Add a little lemon juice and zest to butter cream.
- Add 1 1/2 tbsp chestnut paste to meringue after adding icing sugar, and 1 tbsp to 1/2 butter cream and 2 tbsp to other 1/2 of butter cream.
- Add 2 tbsp matcha (green tea powder) to butter cream.
- Toast 2 tbsp sesame seeds then grind and push through a sieve. Mix into batter when combining icing sugar with almond meal. Process 2 tbsp sesame seeds and push through a sieve, then mix into butter cream.
Technorati Tags: macaroon, macaron, petit four
