When I started baking with the original Tuesdays with Dorie group in 2008, my intention was to learn how to bake for my family as the most I could manage on my own over the years had been boxed brownies or cake and a half dozen cookie recipes from scratch, that was it. Over the course of those four years I learned how to bake things I never thought I would ever learn how to bake. I learned more than I can ever recount. I also made baking friends who remain friends to this day...those weekly baking sessions saw us through birthdays, anniversaries, marriages, children's births, deaths, graduations, holidays, vacations, some scary times, some growing times, but most all happy wonderful times that we all shared with one another in the course of baking together week after week for four years. We became a baking family. So, without further reminiscing, I will just say, "We're BACK!!" Not all of us, and some are new friends to meet and come to know, but I can't describe how happy I am to be baking with old friends gathered around Dorie's latest baking book, Baking Chez Moi: Recipes from My Paris Home to Your Home Anywhere. I can't help wondering what the next years of baking together will bring for all of us...I have missed everyone dearly, it's good to be back.
The first recipe for this round of Tuesdays with Dorie is Palets de Dames Lille Style, found on pages 272-274 of the Baking Chez Moi book. Ingredient list: butter, sugar, salt, eggs, vanilla, flour, confectioner's sugar, milk, and lemon juice. You probably have all these in your pantry at any given moment.
The recipe goes together very easily and the dough is wonderful to work with...that said I had a mixed batch of results with this recipe. The taste and texture were wonderful but I had a bit of a difficult time with the baking process. Some of my cookies spread out into an unsightly mess (yes, I chilled the dough), some were not spreading at all, and some were the proverbial "just right." I chose some of those to photo. The others were happily eaten with nary a complaint, all tasted buttery and sugary with a bit of lemon in the icing. What's not to love about all that in a cookie?
Will this particular recipe be a repeat? Possibly yes from flavor standpoint, but I do need to figure out the inconsistencies I had in baking...in all fairness I am operating with a new-to-me oven and that could possibly be the culprit. Check around with the other bakers this week and see how they did. The blogroll can be found here.