Baking for Noobs

Occasionally, I can be quite an impulsive person. When I was walking through Loblaws and saw sheet pastry in the frozen aisle…my mind instantly linked it to palmiers. Having seen a recipe for palmiers recently and recalling the taste of sweet, flaky, buttery, heart shaped goodness in my mouth, I decided to make it. I’ve always thought baking was my forte even though I’ve only made a few variations of different cookies and cheesecakes (haha very cocky of me, I know). I picked up the ingredients and thought “how hard can it be…it’s akin to baking those pre-made Pillsbury cookie dough”. Oh boy was I wrong!

I went home and followed the recipe to the tee, or so I thought. To my surprise when I opened the oven of my first batch, an abundance of smoke ushered out, all the while getting into my eyes. I experienced 4 seconds of blindness and felt as if my eyeballs were slightly broiled. I regained my eyesight only to find my glasses all fogged up. I was fumbling all over to get the palmiers out ASAP, and managed to burn two fingers. My cookies were burnt to a crisp, rock hard and saturated with sugar. I felt like a total failure and completely dejected. I think I should consider renaming my blog to failblog.

The second time around, my palmiers were much better and not to mention edible. Who would have thought this simple recipe would be so troublesome for me? After two burnt fingers, 1/10th cooked eyeballs, and slaving away for 1.5 hours (when it really should have taken 30 minutes), I finally perfected my palmiers.

Here is the link to the palmiers recipe:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/palmiers-recipe/index.html

My advice to other fellow baking noobs like me:

- Gently sweep off the excess sugar on top before folding the pastry if you like your cookies less sweet and hard.

- When folding the pastry to the center, try to minimize the gap in middle.

- This may sound a little silly, but don’t wear glasses when you’re opening the oven to flip the cookies over. Be warned: it causes severely fogged up glasses. During the wintertime, I always found it enjoyable to laugh at people who came into warm buildings from the cold with harry potter-esque fogged up glasses. I guess it’s not so funny when it happens to you.

It is official, I think I’ve graduated from a n00b baker to a pro hahaha (for palmiers only).

To conclude this entry, here is another picture of my delicious diabetes inducing palmiers: