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

Thomas Keller Recipes: Ile Flottante

This is an Ile flottante like I've never seen before! What class. What refinement. What a surprise. We learned how to make the traditional île flottante dessert in the Anglo program at Ecole Ferrandi (Ecole Supérieure de Cuisine Française). It tasted GREAT. It looked nice....the caramel added a nice touch (see below). However, I haven't made it at home since then, even though I like the flavors. I simply wasn't motivated. Maybe it had something to do with no chocolate!

Made at Ecole Ferrandi, 2006

But that all changed when I saw this one in Thomas Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook (1999). This one inspired me! And this recipe requires some inspiration because, in fact, what looks so simple is actually an accumulation of a lot of steps. But it's oh-so-worth- it!

If you want to see the process on how this is made, check out this incredible blog, French Laundry at Home . She does an awesome job of showing all the steps. It involves:

1. Making a mint oil ==> it's hard to see in mine, but it's under the black dots in the crème anglaise. The black dots are a reduction of balsamic vinaiger which I added on my own - it's not part of Keller's recipe. My mint oil didn't infuse long enough & wasn't green enough, so that's why I ended up adding the balsamic which, by the way, tasted great with it!
   
2. Making the meringue
3. Making a chocolate mousse for putting inside the meringue. This is the best part. Chocolate!
4. Making the chocolate tuiles.
5. Shaving the chocolate (tempering the chocolate & then shaving it with a chef's knife; this is the long way to do it. You can also just use a vegetable peeler & peel a block of chocolate if you want or have a block.)
6. Making candy sprinkles (blitzing a candy bar in my Cuisineart; another addition I made because I thought it would taste good. And it did!).
7. Making the crème anglaise.
8. Assembling it (ie, emptying a hole in the meringue, spooning in the chocolate mousse & then trimming the outside to make it look perfect)
   
9. Plating it.
   

But this is worth the effort! We had a nice dinner & finished it with this dessert. The chocolate mousse inside is a GREAT surprise since it's not part of the traditional dessert. The thing that was so amazing is how light this tasted. It was full of flavor - the mint, meringue, crème anglaise, and chocolate all worked so well together! And yet, we were not weighed down by a heavy dessert. In fact, it left us wishing we could have a just a little bit more! That, in my opinion, is the right way to end a dinner and the sign of a good dessert! Can't wait to make these again.