The July Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Nicole at Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.
This month’s challenge included two recipes with the option to do both or just one or the other. I was so very excited about the idea of making marshmallows myself, coz this is something I have seen on various food blogs the last year and have been so intrigued by.
Honestly, marshmallows are one of those things I thought could only be made in factories. You know, in the category with haribo, something only the insane would attempt to make themselves. Possibly I even considered they were not even made out of real ingredients but just mgically appeared out the factory door… But apparently marshmallows are fair game for 2000+ daring bakers, so I was ready to have a go.
As was my friend Hannah when she came into town to help. Ok, she came into town to see me, but that usually involves baking. But you have no idea how difficult it is to find light corn syrup in this city. And I couldn’t honestly be bothered to add on the faff of making my own into the recipe (something which, again, would have fallen in my “only made in factories” classification).
So we sighed and looked disappointed and then set to making the Milan Cookies.
It was a fun recipe, especially coz it involved two boxes of icing sugar, seperating six eggs (I love seperating eggs), and then the discovery that Rasmus has a lemon juicer that could be in a Danish design magazine.
We substituted lemon juice for lemon extract, and added some orange juice as well as the zest to the chocolate filling, coz the orangey zinginess was just so good. And our cookies were decidedly non-uniform in shape and size, but that only adds to their charm!
When they first came out the oven they were very crispy. Hannah took half home with her and the other half were served up to our church expression last night, where they quickly disappeared. They were noticably softer by then, and despite that being not so “milan”, Rasmus and I agreed we actually preferred them that way – the chocolate was less likely too ooze everywhere, and the floor was less likely to be sprayed with shards of cookies each time you took a bite… 🙂
Later in the evening, I tried taking some arty pictures of the cookies, and I’m quite proud of how well my wee pink Sony camera did!
Bring on the August challenge!
