Thursday, March 31, 2011

Dorie's Salted Butter Break-Ups



Ever since I have set my eyes on these cookies on Purplefoodie's blog I haven't been able to keep my mind off these. I have been dreaming about these with my eyes open and sometimes I feel I can just taste them but haven't had the chance to make them!

Now, I have to usually get books shipped to India which becomes way to expensive and so I don't know a lot of cookbooks that I would love to - I have added Dorie's Around the French Table to it obviously... also, with her recipes you don't seem to go wrong and they somehow come together perfectly and all the ingredients complement each other to form some of the tastiest of treats!

Now, like I mentioned I have read the recipes a couple of times but haven't been able to get my hands on "fleur de sel" and have been on the look out for it for a long time... I thought that it would have added the extra bit of zing to my recipe but since I haven't been able to find it - I had to settle for baking it with regular salt and they were I must say scrumptious and once you started eating them you couldn't put them down!

It was a weekend and I hadn't been able to get much sleep as my toddler who is still sleeping with us kept kicking me all night and I could hear some loud blaring truck horns on the road (yeah, thats what you get for living face the Gurgaon-Faridabad highway). So I got up at around 4am to make the dough and at about 6am to bake it. By the time my help was in making my morning coffee the house was smelling full of scrumptious (yes, I am using it again to describe these) biscuits and my son literally followed his nose to the kitchen.

Once you get your hands on this recipe - you should go give it a try and not even think about waiting for any extra days or leaving it on the backburner... all the ingredients are most definitely going to be in your pantry - tea time will be a treat, your kids will love it and coffee breaks will be a delight. So go ahead and try it.

Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups all purpose flour (I added 1/2 cup whole wheat flour)
2/3 cup castor sugar
9 tbsp cold butter
3-5 tbsp cold water
2 tsp salt (I didn't have fleur de sel) and more for sprinkling

Glaze:
Egg yolk with water - but i used fresh cream

Recipe:
Put the flour, sugar and salt in a bowl and give it a quick mix.

Add the butter and start rubbing it in the dry ingredients till it forms coarse pieces - pea sized and bigger is fine.

Now add some cold water and start getting the dough together to form a ball. (I had a very soft dough even after chilling - maybe coz I did it with my hands). Wrap the dough in plastic and let it chill for an hour.

 Preheat the oven to 350F/ 170C.

Remove the dough and roll it out with a rolling pin into a rectangle. She has recommended putting a criss cross pattern with your fork on it but mine was too soft to get a pattern - so I just put a glaze. Also I rolled it in two of my fluted pastry tins so it got a nice pattern around the edges which was later hardly seen.

I then baked it in the oven for about 40 minutes and they were more golden than they should have been - I guess I should have pulled them out a little earlier.

I liked mine really crisp but they were buttery and soft inside and I cut them into triangles and they were perfect with my morning cuppa and a magazine on a lazy Sunday morning...

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