Tuesdays with Dorie: Biscuits Roses from Baking with Dorie

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe comes from Baking with Dorie. Biscuits Roses (de Reims) are something i have had a fair number of times when in France but never made before so I was excited to give them a try!

What are Biscuits Roses? You can read all about it in The Quest for a Famous French Cookie’s Crunch (gifted article). Dorie explains that

Fossier’s biscuits roses — pink sugar-topped cookies — is a classic that’s been made in France’s Champagne region since the 17th century. The cookies, once meant to dip in Champagne (which wasn’t dry then) and now often served as a snack with coffee and tea, are sweet but not exceedingly so, and only lightly flavored with vanilla. They are pink like bubble gum (they’re tinted with carmine, a red food coloring) and shaped like rectangles (they’re baked in special molds). But their most distinctive characteristic is their extreme crispness — no matter how dainty you aim to be, each bite produces crumbs, a small flurry of powdered sugar and a crackle that can be heard across the table.

(ADT Marne, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The crunch traditionally comes from ammonium carbonate (smelling salts) but Dorie couldn’t bear working with this 

even though it dissipates in baking, just opening the box was more than [she] could manage. And so I threw it away and decided instead to depend on technique and the recipe’s simple ingredients: eggs, sugar, flour, cornstarch, leavening, vanilla and powdered sugar for the top.

The crunch also comes from the “twice baking” (“bis” cuit” = twice baked) and drying the mixture out before baking. Dorie achieves this by “drying” both the yolks and the whites of the egg by beating each separately with sugar, delicately incorporating the whites into the yolks and then dusting with icing sugar twice before baking. The cookies are baked in the oven then dried in the oven.

I made these twice and because I HAVE eaten them neither batch was what I was expecting/ wanted. Here are some issues I had (and it’s obviously me, not the recipe because it looks like Dorie spent ages fine-tuning this!):

1. The recipe calls for a 1-inch piping tip to pipe there out. I used a 3/4-inch piping tip and they were too wide, no matter how delicately I piped them (they also expanded in the oven). I don’t know how you could get them to stay 1-inch in width if you used a 1-inch piping tip.
2. I managed to get 14 from a full recipe, not the 16 the recipe called for.
3. The Biscuits Rose that you buy in the supermarket are a bit lighter inside than mine were. My air bubbles were tiny meaning these were hard (even though they were larger than they should have been, I imagined they might have been underbaked and chewy but they were not – and also I’d describe them as crunchy but not crispy and they didn’t produce the crumbs I would expect).
4. The flavour of both batches was predominantly egg white. While the originals don’t taste like much, it’s more like a meringue flavour but these were a bit eggy 🙁

Will I make these again? Indeed I will. I am now on a mission to get them right! This recipe calls for a lower baking temperature and a longer baking time. But I’ll try Dorie’s recipe again before I experiment too much – maybe third time’s the charm?

 

Get the recipe for Biscuits Rose on p 185 of Baking with Dorie or here (gifted recipe)

Buy Baking with Dorie and join us baking through the book!

Buy Baking with Dorie on Amazon (this link should bring you to the Amazon store geographically closest to you). For free worldwide shipping, buy it on Blackwell’s. To support your local Indie bookstore, purchase on Bookshop.org.

Then join us over on Tuesdays with Dorie and bake your way through the book!

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Disclosure: I was provided with a copy of “Baking with Dorie” for review purposes. I was not asked to write about the book, nor am I being compensated for doing so. All opinions are 100% my own.

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