Bend and Snap

People have often told me and then in turn I have assured myself that I would be awesome on the Great British Bake Off or least I would be a cause for amusement on a Tuesday evening as I would be the one having a mental breakdown in front of the oven or watching on as my biscuit tower crumbled into a heap.

Therefore very much like last year, I decided to try out some of the technical challenges. If you have been following this blog you may know that I tried my hand at making teacakes last year and apart from tasting a bit like toothpaste and not looking all together that wonderful they weren’t actually too bad so I was hoping…..and this was a big ask I know that this time would go slightly better even if I was attempting…wait for it…the tuille.

The Tuille for those of you who don’t know gets its name from the French word for tile and is an incredibly thin biscuit often rolled into curved rounds or cigarette like rolls and the ends are dipped in chocolate, it was the latter that I was attempting today and let’s just say that things didn’t quite go as planned.

The recipe for tuilles is the simplest bit about them as they only require three ingredients:

2 egg whites

85g sugar

100g flour 

Indeed the recipe is very straight forward. Firstly you are instructed to preheat the oven to 180°c –smashing I can do that.

 Next combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix into a batter. The mixture should be thicker than a batter for a pancake but not too thick so that is still liquid and can be easily spread. Trust me you will want to spread it. 

Finally bake in the oven for about five minutes or until golden brown. Remove and roll into shape.

It sounds like these biscuits should be a stroll in the park….remind yourself of that thought when you’re pulling your hair out an hour later because THEY KEEP BREAKING!

This one gave up

aww look a heart

The thickness of your tuille will often determinate whether or not it will succeed in life if it is too thin it will be too brittle and snap but if it is too thick it will be chewy and gross.  

Too thick and it's all squishy

The thickness of the biscuit is not the only deciding factor in whether or not your tuille will live as the cooking time matters a lot too. The overcooked tuille is too brittle to work with where was if the tuille is undercooked (often you can tell this if it hasn’t gone ever so slightly golden) it won’t be crisp enough to be get a satisfying snap. As my good friend Elle Woods taught me in Legally Blonde it’s all about the bend and snap.

Having had (hopefully) determined what is a good tuille bake we now focus our attention to the actual cooking process. At first I tried putting a few blobs of batter onto the mixture before spreading it out and then popping it in the oven yet I quickly realised that this wasn’t going to work as the biscuits had nearly all hardened before I could even get one off the tray. A method that I found worked best was to make one tuille at a time spreading the batter very thinly on the board. I used a chopstick to roll the tuilles into cigarette rolls yet this brought with it its own perils as the biscuits snapped more than the crocodile in Peter Pan.

This 'roll' was clearly not 'rollin' with the homies'

I think that it safe to say that Tuilles are not in my top 10 list of things bake list especially when they crack and shatter to pieces and not even melted chocolate can bring them back to life.