Pastry Class: Road Trip Cookies (Biscuits aux M&Ms)

A friend of mine recently left Paris to seek the greener pastures of food tourism (or I should say to go study those greener pastures). Amongst other impacts, this left an empty spot at the Centre Vercingétorix where she taught pastry class on Saturdays. Whereas I'd have preferred that she stayed in Paris, if she had to leave and if her old job needed to be filled, I was glad she offered my name as her replacement.

Now it's my turn to teach pastry class at the Centre Vercingétorix in the 14th arrondissement. There are 12 students. They simply want to learn more about making pastries, desserts and sweets things. It's nothing high strung - nothing requiring students to be perfectionists....it's a community center offering classes to residents of the city. Key words here include conviviality...fun...and pastry. I like those words!

For last week's class, I opted for a simple & manageable idea: cookies. We are, after all, still getting acclimated to the kitchen, its limited amenities & to each other! The class was divided into three groups, each with a different recipe in hand (two American & one French). See if you can pick out the French cookie (!) - the choices are: chocolate chip, sablé chocolat, and Road Trip Cookies. Gee I wonder...

Everyone in the class liked all three recipes, but it was unanimous - the favorite was the Road Trip cookie, which I'm loosely translating to Biscuits aux M&Ms....or Biscuits de la route, if you prefer! Because of its popularity that day, I thought it would be a good recipe to post. Hope you like it.


Adapted from the Cookbook: Death by Chocolate - Cookies
Author: Marcel Desaulniers (Despite the rather french sounding name, he is an American chef and part-owner of The Trellis Restaurant in Williamsburg, Virginia).

Ingredients - for 55 small cookies

chocolate bar, (64% cocoa minimum) 170 g
flour (2 ½ cups) 340 g
baking soda (1 tsp) 6 g
salt ( ½ tsp) 6 g
granulated sugar (¾ cup) 160 g
dark brown sugar (¾ cup) 160 g
butter, room temp (¼ lb) 115 g
eggs (jumbo) 2
vanilla extract (2 tsp) 15 g
Peanut M&Ms* 200 g

1st step. Melt the chocolate in a bain marie**. Set aside.

2nd step. Weigh out the flour, baking soda & salt. Sift them & set aside.

3rd step. Weigh the sugars (granulated & brown) and the butter in a big bowl. Beat with a hand mixer until creamy. Add the eggs, one at a time, and mix well. Add the vanill & the melted chocolate & stir to incorporate.

4th step. Add the dry ingredients (from the 2nd step) to the wet ingredients (of the 3rd step) and stir with a wooden spoon. Form the dough into balls and let rest in the fridge at least 30 minutes.

5th step. Cook the cookies in a pre-heated oven at 175°C for 11 - 13 minutes on prepared cookie sheets (with parchment paper, Silpat or greased). Remove to cooling rack.

Notes
* the original recipe calls for 1 1/2 cup of peanut M&Ms. I used only a cup, or about 200g. I thought it was plenty of peanut, but feel free to add more than my suggested amount!
** bain marie = pan of simmering water over which you place a bowl for melting the chocolate. The water should not boil. The choclate melts faster when broken into pieces first.

Enjoy!

:/dma

Pierre Hermé's "World Peace Cookies"

Today I joined the bandwagon - the WPC bandwagon. World Peace Cookies, that is.

So the story goes, Pierre Hermé created this recipe when he worked at a restaurant called Korova. It was Dorrie Greenspan, however, who published the recipe in her book Baking: From my Home to Yours. The story further goes that it was Dorrie's neighbor who, after tasting her cookie, said something like "these are so good....in our house we call them world peace cookies because we're convinced that if everyone ate these, world peace would ensue"....or something to this affect. From that point on, a new name was born.

What these cookies are in fact is a sablé chocolat (a choclate shortbread). The dough is very dry, as you can see from the photo. They contain not a single egg. The chocolate content is higher than the butter content. Not too bad for the diet, in my opinion, as far as cookies go. And very chocolaty! It has one secret ingredient, fleur de sel, which give them that little je ne sais quoi (I don't know what). Special. Chocolate & salt go very, very well together...


I highly recommend making these. I am apparently lucky because I read a few posts on the internet and some have had extremely crumbly dough (difficult to work with) or flat cookies. I'll take luck anyday! By the way, this is a roll into a log, refrigerate & slice-before-baking kind of cookie. I threw the logs into the freezer that last 20 minutes before slicing (out of a 3-hour total rest period in the fridge). And I cooked them in a convection oven (165°C) for 13 minutes instead of 12. Seemed to work well this time. I'm not sure if those are clues into anything valuable, but I thought I'd share that anyway.


Here's a link to the recipe by Dorrie Greenspan. World Peace Cookies. (Actually, it's a link to someone's blog that Dorrie herself refers everyone to.)

It's definitely worth sharing some of this peace in the world.

/:dma