Thursday, March 22, 2012

cocoa sablés - French Fridays w/ Dorie

Cooling Cocoa Sablés
Everyone loves cookies and I rarely bake cookies if it's not Christmastime. To be honest, I still have Christmas cookies in the freezer. That's not to say I don't love cookies, I just don't love them as much as I love ice cream. But on to the sablés. Sablé translates to sand, which comes from the texture of the cookie. I found an audio translation at http://en.bab.la/dictionary/english-french/sable, since I kept making my 7 year old laugh each time I'd try to say it. I think I was channeling Pee Wee.

The ingredients are very similar to shortbread - butter, sugar, flour. The texture was completely different and I'm sure it's because I didn't use the extra 1/2 stick of butter and had planned on adjusting the flour but ended up adding a little extra cocoa and didn't really decrease the flour enough.
Very soft butter, given our 80 degree day!
I don't think this is what they mean by sandy texture

I don't think it made that much of a difference in the finished product. I did check out a couple of other FFWD people and one showed dough that was soft enough to roll out. Mine was hardly that soft. In fact, I had to add in a bit of water to get it to come together, like a pastry dough. That did work and I got it rolled into two logs - different sizes because the thought of turning these into ice cream sandwiches, as suggested in Around My French Table, sounded intriguing.

Tomorrow evening I'm going to bake the second half and make them thinner and not coat the tops with the sugar, but just on the sides, because I would like to make mini ice cream sandwiches to bring to a dinner on Saturday. I did need to give them a try and started to crumble a couple of the small ones into a bowl and these were so crumbly one of them exploded and went all over the counter. I managed to keep most of it in the bowl and it made a nice mix in for my mint chip ice cream. The chocolate flavor was nice and they had a good vanilla flavor to them as well. I really like the color of the special dark Hershey's cocoa.

Rolled, sliced and ready to sugar


Counter covered with "sablé" crumbs

13 comments:

Adriana said...

I hope your sandwiches turn out great! I baked so many cookies over the holidays I am just getting over baking fatigue. Good thing this was a simple recipe to ease me back into it.

Kara said...

Ha I definitely had a bunch of little dough crumbs left over too.

Cher Rockwell said...

I generally try to avoid baking cookies as much as possible. But I don't avoid eating them as much as possible. Irony.
The crusty sugary coat looks very inviting :-)

yummychunklet said...

Your cocoa sables look fantastic!

Unknown said...

The topside sugar-coated sables look pretty inviting, I must admit. And I liked the way you demonstrated your exploded cookies in that one photo, that had me smiling :).

Ei said...

I really like the idea of ice cream sandwiches. Some Cherry Garcia sounds like a divine match with these cookies to me. Glad everything worked out for you!

Unknown said...

I love how dark your cookies are! So good!

Elaine said...

I like that you covered some of the tops of your cookies with sugar. I bet these would be delicious with ice cream - mixed in or as an ice cream sandwich.

Betsy said...

Let us know how the ice cream sandwiches come out. I haven't yet seen that anyone else tried them. They look delicious, even the crumbs.

Kathleen said...

Mint chocolate chip ice cream sounds wonderful to make sandwiches with. Yum!

Teresa said...

Both versions look great! We froze a bunch of these, so they might be destined to become ice cream sandwiches some time this summer.

Marie said...

It's surprising how different the colors were in all the pictures--from light brown to almost black. I really like the rich color of yours.

laurcl said...

Thanks everyone. My daughter had an ice cream sandwich and appeared to have eaten it in pieces, but enjoyed it. I made the second batch and will post pics for that now. The cocoa I used was the Hershey's special dark. It's similar to a King Arthur variety of dark cocoa. It's a Dutched cocoa and from what I read, doesn't provide as many antioxidants as regular, but it looks so nice. It's the way Oreos are so dark.