Hi! everyone I am Dyann and welcome to Dyann Bakes, thanks to so many of you for visiting our website dyannbakes.com. Now cookies and candy make wonderful holiday guests and today using puff pastry I am going to make a lovely little cookie called the Palmier. You may know it by another name, Elephant ear or a butterfly, and they are the simple combination of puff pastry and caramelized sugar and they are really easy to make and there is sort of this cross between a cookie and a candy and they are just that easy and they are really simple. When they come out of the oven, that's then they are the best.
Here in front of me I have a piece of puff pastry, now I have made this from scratch and I have promised one of our viewers Pepe that I would dedicate an entire episode to making puff pastry, but I am going to use the one that I have here and just to know that the puff pastry, you can buy in a super market in the frozen fruit section. It's excellent, it's a great product and its really perfect for making these cookies.
So here I have puff pastry and it doesn't have a lot of flavor and that's good thing because you can make it sweet like we're going to do today or you can make it savory, I am sure you have had cheese straws, that's puff pastry and it has got tender cheese folded into itself.
You can do it as what you like, but because we are making it sweet, instead of sprinkling my counter top with flour, I am going to sprinkle it with sugar and you want to embed as much sugar as you can into the dough and also it acts like the flour in keeping it from sticking, let's press it down a little, get the sugar into the dough, we're going to try to keep it as straight as we can because we're going to be folding it and puff pastry is part of a family of doughs called laminated doughs where they have lots of layers, hundreds and hundreds of layers of alternating dough and fat and the fat that we use is butter and butter has a really high water content, so when coco butter hits a hot oven the water that's in the butter turns to steam.
So here you have a layer of dough, a layer of butter, a layer of dough and then that steam puffs up and it makes the dough layer above it puff up and that's how you get the flakiness of puff pastry. So alright, back to our Palmiers.
So here is the puff pastry and we're just going to fold it sort of making like the spine of the book and just fold the top down to the middle, oops! I have a little tear, that's okay, the top to the middle and now the bottom up to the middle as well, so you are going to need it in the center. Try to make them even, so we still have a lots of sugar on it, so it's not going to stick and then this top piece folds over on the bottom piece and we have this cylinder of dough. Now this is going to be sliced into the individual cookies, but before then I want to put it into fridge for about 15 minutes.
So the dough has been in the refrigerator for about 15 minutes. Now I am going to cut the individual cookies. Now in addition to cutting them, I am going to paint each side with water and then dip them again in sugar, put them face down on a prepared pan, I have lined this with a non stick sheet called the silpat and the oven has been set at 350 degrees and then I need to bake for about 20 minutes and you'll see the sugar caramelizes and that is where that candy piece comes into it, because it's like nothing you have ever seen. It gets all crispy and golden and it's really very beautiful and they are delicious.
So I am going to just finish up, try to make them uniform because you're going to be baking them all at the same time and it's always best to have things of the same size on a sheet at the same time. What I have done is, I staggered them on the pan, press both sides, dip a little and sort of spanned out at the top just so ever so slightly. Now I am going to take this and put it in oven that's been set at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes until they are golden brown. Okay so now these are done. It has been about 20 minutes and you can see they are just this lovely combination of cookie on one side and candy on the other.
So everyone thank you for joining me, I hope to see you next time.
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