Chocolate dipped florentines
A little magic is in the air today. Outside it’s snowing. Inside I’m cleaning house and preparing mentally for a holiday spent in a French pastry shop. After today, my next day off is January 1st. Yikes! I’m afraid I won’t want to see another bûche de noël for as long as I live. We’ll see.
Florentines are a nice cookie for the holidays, especially dolled up in dark chocolate. This is a fabulous and simple recipe. I found it on David Lebovitz’s site, who found it in a cookbook from a London-based restaurant called Ottolenghi. There is just a hint of orange, a perfect compagnon for toasted almonds and chocolate. A plus for some people: these cookies are gluten-free and dairy-free, unless you call eggs dairy.
Here’s a little tip that you might find handy: You can make powdered sugar by putting regular granulated sugar in a coffee grinder and giving it a spin for a few seconds. (I have resurrected a second coffee grider for this purpose, so I don’t always have to clean the coffee dust out of it.)
If you know how to make a chocolate cornet, use it to decorate the cookies. Otherwise cut a teeny tiny hole in the corner of a plastic bag to pipe the chocolate stripes.
Recipe for florentines:
Click see on David Lebovitz’s blog. I followed it exactly. Just be sure to let the almonds become a nice golden-brown. I took mine out of the oven a minute too soon.. but they were still delicious.
Monica,
Can’t wait to try this one. I’m not on a gluten-free diet anymore, but still enjoy finding good gluten-free stuff.
Thanks! Good luck with all the Christmas baking!