While these don't look as good as Prue's, I actually am pretty proud of how they turned out. They aren't as tall or as defined as they should be, and somehow I forgot the walnut on top, but they tasted really good. It was especially fun to do these, because Anna, who has been baking through all the technicals too, was able to visit for the day and do them with me! So we had our own little final party bakeoff.
The first step was the walnut cookie base. This part was definitely the simplest part of the bake, even though the dough was really soft to work with. Since I don't have a 4 cm round cutter, we had to improvise a bit. My cookie dough scooper is just shy of 4 cm, so we used that.
Sidenote: the recipe claims to make 8 cookies. We got 28. How that happened is a mystery.
The next step was the coffee ganache. This is where we take the time to remind you all of the virtues of reading a recipe before starting it. I, for some reason, did not, and when I read the ingredient list and saw "coffee beans" I thought to myself, we can just use coffee grounds and it will be fine. We'll have to grind it anyway. Ha! No, we were supposed to infuse the cream with the whole coffee beans to make the ganache. So, it was improvising time again.
The first time we let the coffee grounds sit too long in the cream and couldn't strain them out. So we tried again another time, letting them only sit in the cream until the cream boiled and then strained them out. That worked, so at least disaster was avoided until the next step.
Now comes the lesson in not trying to bake too many things at once. We were baking lots of cookies that day, and these were just one of them, so through mis-reading the recipe we ended up getting the ganache too hot and split it. Thankfully, a quick google search informed us that if your ganache splits you can blend it back together.
Another near disaster averted.
Neither of us had leaves of gelatin, and we did googling ahead of time and decided to try using powdered gelatin instead. We had to bloom it in water, and we were unsure whether it would work or not. Would this be near disaster number three?
To make the marshmallow you heat corn syrup and sugar together on the stove and then add it to beaten egg whites and whisk into a meringue. Then you whisk in the gelatin bit by bit. I was worried about this step, but it actually turned out really well.
I don't have many pictures of assembly, because I was trying to be quick about it. First we piped on the coffee ganache. It was supposed to be in a cone shape, but mine didn't hold it's shape and flattened out. I don't know if it is because it should have been colder or if I just didn't do it correctly. IN any case, the consistency and taste still turned out fine, even if the shape was wrong.
Then I piped on the marshmallow, which did hold its shape for the most part. Then we had to try tempering chocolate again, which I was dreading after last week. However, it worked so much better this week. Dipping them in the chocolate, on the other hand, wasn't the prettiest or smoothest operation ever.
Honestly they just look kind of sad. We didn't have quite enough chocolate for all of them, so the last ones just got a drizzle.
Again, not beautiful by any means. However, we all agreed that they tasted really good. We aren't big fans of marshmallow desserts, but you couldn't even taste the marshmallow really. It just added some creaminess to the chocolate and coffee tastes. It was very tasty, and I think I would try them again sometime, and see if I could make them look more professional.
Overall, I had a ton of fun baking through these technical challenges, and I've already decided I'm going to try again next year. This season of the GBBO was so good, and I will probably always have fond memories of it because of baking along with it.
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