Almond Tuiles
Christmas Recipes Lacto-Ovo Vegetarian Recipes French Desserts
Fine and crispy cookies as if wrapped in a caramelized sugar crust. The name comes from their tile-like shape (tuiles = tiles in French).
How did I come to make them? At my brother's wedding, some amazing cookies were served with coffee and I couldn't stop thinking about them. At that moment I didn't know exactly how they were made, but I was crazy about them. They haunted me all week, but they didn't resemble anything I had eaten before, so no chance of reproducing them - I had no starting point. But Saturday morning, out of nowhere, I remembered reading a Judy Rodgers recipe called Tuiles and I jumped up... That was it! The "coffee cookies" from the wedding were surely "tuiles"! I might have figured it out sooner, but at the wedding they weren't in their traditional shape - they were flat and tiny with almonds sprinkled on top, not added to the batter. All that was left was to try the recipe and confirm my intuition was right.
They can be served with fruit foam or sauce, chocolate mousse, ice cream, any sweet cream (vanilla, chocolate). But they can also be served alongside a glass of champagne or a cup of coffee.
Ingredients
30g butter
80g sugar (brown or white)
50g sliced almonds
20g all-purpose flour
1 egg white
1 pinch of salt
Makes: 18
How to prepare almond tuiles
- Melt the butter in a small saucepan over low heat. Then turn the heat to medium and cook the butter until it starts to darken in color, from yellow to golden-brown, and you see some sediment spots at the bottom of the pan (about 2 minutes).
- Pour the butter into a bowl. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix. You'll get a viscous mixture, like caramel that flows slowly off the whisk.
- Line a tray with parchment paper. With a teaspoon, place small mounds of mixture on the paper. With the back of the spoon, shape them into circles as thin as possible. The circles won't spread during baking, so you can place them fairly close together. I fit 6 circles per tray.
- Bake at 200°C for just over 5 minutes, until the cookies are slightly brown around the edges. Don't bake them less because they won't become crispy - the sugar needs time to caramelize.
- Remove the tray from the oven and lift the cookies very quickly (otherwise they stick to the paper). The easiest way is to lift them with a pastry spatula. The cookies will be soft and pliable. Place them on a rolling pin (or other cylindrical form) and let them cool that way. This gives them their characteristic curved shape. When cool, the cookies will become brittle.
- As soon as they cool, put them in an airtight container, otherwise the sugar in them absorbs moisture and they soften quickly.
The butter
Cookie mixture
Mixture consistency
Forming discs on the tray
Lifting with a spatula while hot
Cooling on rolling pin to get curved shape
