January's Daring Bakers Challenge: Tuiles

This month's challenge is brought to us by Karen of Baking Soda and Zorra of 1x umruehren bitte aka Kochtopf.

They have chosen Tuiles from The Chocolate Book by Angélique Schmeink and Nougatine and Chocolate Tuiles from Michel Roux.

So, I had a brilliant idea for my tuiles. (Is that plural? What's the singular for tuile, is it tuile??)

I totally didn't want to do butterflies cause everyone was going to try butterflies and butterflies are so tramp stamp. So instead I went with something waaaaaaaaaaaay more sophisticated. Kitties.

Yeah. Totally.

So to start I had to figure out how I was going to make my stencil. See the tuile batter is pretty thin and you have to spread it over a stencil to get the shape you want. The option was given to make it free form and I did that too, but the kitty face is more interesting so I'm going to tell you the story of that instead.

I went over to Michael's to get a piece of something to make into my stencil. I knew I would need something flexible and plastic. I thought about vellum, but after talking to the very knowledgeable sales associate at Michael's, she brought up the good point that vellum, as a paper product wouldn't really stand up to liquid very well and the chance of reuse would be slim to none. Plastic it was. But what!?!? She suggested I go across the street to Office Depot to buy a overhead transparency sheet, but I really wasn't feeling up to another stop so I walked around and scoped out the store.

What to get? What to get?

I went with this brilliant find in the scrapbooking section:

Huzzah! Plastic! Durable! Best part: in the sale rack for $1.00

A dollar!

With my purchase in hand I came home and got started. I took my little Craft Keepers envelope and cut it up.

Once I had my two sheets, I could trace out my design. I figured the two sheets were good cause if I totally messed up one sheet, I still had another one to work with.

At work I had Googled "cat outline" and prited out a cute shape of kitty face I wanted to use. I know I know, not a great way to spend my work time, but I needed a good printer for this.

Above you see how I used a pen to trace out the kitty face. When I cut out the shape though I made sure to cut outside the pen line so as to leave no pen ink on my stencil and thus no pen ink in my cookies.

Using Ken's X-acto knife, I cut out the shapes using this month's Real Simple magazine (which I've still not read) as a pad.

So that was that! I now I had my stencil. Woo hoo!! And since I didn't really mess up my sheet, I now have another sheet to use in the future. All for a dollar!

It then came time to make the cookies. And here's where I messed up. Yeah I know, I totally rawked that stencil and my cookies were just meh. The problem my friends was two fold.

1. I didn't get my butter soft enough. Therefore my batter was lumpy with cold butter pieces. This presented a problem during baking as the little chunks of butter heated up and smeared some of my kitty faces. Sad sad kitties.

2. I didn't flavor them enough. They gave a couple recipes one for sweet and one for savory. I used the sweet, but when it said a dash of vanilla, I guess I took them too literally and so my cookies had little to no flavor at all.

I was able though to make two kinds like I said. I made the kitty faces, using melted dark chocolate in a little ziplock to make the eyes, nose and whiskers.

Not bad huh? Better than a dumb ol' butterfly. Meow! Meow!

I paired the tuile with pistachio gelato from Ciao Bella gelato. Nom nom nom! I love pistacio gelato and the best is when they put big chunks of the nut or fruit in it. Delish!

So finally, in an effort to try out shaping the cookies as was suggested in the challenge, I put a little orange juice glass upside down, put the cookie on top and sandwiched it over the glass with another o.j. glass.

The result was a little bowl which I then used to put a scoop of the pistachio gelato in.

Sweet! To showcase both the kitty face and the bowl, I used my nicest French-inspired plates and linens. Voila! Cest fini!

Comments

[jo]

Very cute, like the hello kitty shape. I used a disposable party plate for my templates.

[Anne]

That's just so cute! I love it!

[Margaret]

Very cutey kitty. Just adorable. Much better than butterfly.