I enjoy watching the Great British Baking Show. This does not surprise anyone! I am not a dedicated baker -- I tend to wander here and there in the cooking world (again, not a surprise) -- but that show is a delight. I often wonder what I would do if I was in the contestants' shoes, and honestly assess my skills as seriously lacking in comparison with theirs.
The technical challenge is especially intriguing to someone who plays with old recipes. The "pared down" recipes sound so much like what old recipes say! "Mix it, cook it, and serve" quite often are the type of directions old recipes have, or they say things like "boil" without specifying how hard, how long. (Note to my gentle readers: "boiling beef" means use a gentle simmer, or the meat becomes tough and chewy. Trust me on this one.)
So when I was reading The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie and spotted the sweet biscuit recipe called "Dead Men's Bones," I was intrigued. I didn't realize how much like a GBBS technical challenge it would be until I set out to try it.
The Lady's book was written during her lifetime and published by her husband after her death. It is a compilation of Victorian era recipes and, because of the large number of them as well as their simplicity and the variations due to many cooks contributing, is considered to be very important and representative of the time. In a previous post, I made the recipe for Frontignac (elderflower syrup). Click here to read it.
Halloween is rapidly approaching and I wanted to make this recipe available in time for it.
From page 27, in the "Biscuits, Sweet" section, we are given:
This looks pretty straightforward.
5 ounces all-purpose flour
4 ounces sugar
3 egg whites
vanilla to taste
My Notes
I used vanilla-scented sugar, so I did not add any more vanilla.
Now here is where the technical challenge jumped right in: How much should the egg whites be whipped?
I decided to take them to about firm peak.
Here is where the trouble began. When I mixed in the flour and sugar, the whole thing became thick and stiff.
I suspected (and I was right) that there was no way this would go through a funnel. I decided to drop spoonfuls onto my baking sheet and bake them at 325 degrees F. After 11 minutes they were very light brown on the bottom.
When they cooled, they were crunchy but not crisp. They had a nice vanilla and sweet flavor.
However nice they were, they were not what I expected from the recipe.
Take Two
I decided to add about 3 tablespoons water to thin the batter down and make it runny enough to pass through a funnel.
It worked but it flowed so slooooooooowly that I ended up using a chopstick to push it through.
You can see above that I made them small. I tried the round (ratafia) and the long shapes and a few creations of my own.
I had no idea how long to let them "rise a little before the fire" and the batter was spreading so I waited maybe five minutes before putting them into the oven at 325 deg F. It took 8 minutes to get the bottoms lightly browned.
Then I glazed them with just powdered sugar mixed with a little water and brushed on them while they were hot.
They weren't really crisp as much as they were chewy, and too sticky from the glaze, even after they cooled. The flavor was a nice vanilla but, frankly, they weren't interesting to eat. After a few hours, they were downright hard to bite.
Take Three
I used the same quantities but this time didn't beat the whites very much. Really just until foamy and not showing liquid white below the foam.
The flour and sugar mix still made it stiff so I added a little bit of water until it was thick but flowed smoothly.
I put some on my silicone-coated pan and some on a standard baking sheet and baked them at 350 degrees F. My hope was that baking them a little faster would crisp them.
At 10 minutes, they weren't looking baked. At 12 minutes they were almost there. And then life intervened and I didn't get back to them until 14 minutes...
The ones on the silicone pan came off and were obviously overbaked. You can see that they flowed together while baking as I had left a good 1/2 inch or more between them.
They did not taste good as they were tough and dry.
The ones on the standard baking sheet were glued solid on the surface.
You can see the broken one -- that is where I used a spatula with great effort to remove the cookie. The rest had to be soaked about an hour in hot water to be removed.
The Verdict
I was glad I was not in the tent and that Paul and Prue were not watching. What a disaster! I ended up throwing the cookies away.
Failure.
I have since done some reading. I probably should have baked them at a lower temperature (say, 300 degrees F) instead of increasing it to 350.
I'm not sure how much the egg whites should have been beaten.
The addition of the flour is what bothered me. If it had been just sugar, the cookies would have been a crispy meringue. The flour seemed to bring the whole mixture to a thick dough instead of a batter.
What Lady Clark would have done is beyond me.
No comments:
Post a Comment