The JWU Culinary Chronicles: Cookies Day 4

1. We started the day with spritz cookies. Spritz are just a piped butter cookie. We made rosette shaped ones with a tiny bit of raspberry in the center. We also did shell shaped ones, that we partialy dipped in chocolate.

2. We then made milano cookies. The dough was made in a big batch for the enire class, so all we had to do was pipe the dough, bake them, and dip them in chocolate.

3. Next, we started our French macarons. I LOVE macarons!! I had made a bunch of macarons a few days before, so I was on a macaron roll. We made very small blue shells. They have to dry, in order to form a skin on the top. This process takes forever in the Charlotte humidity. They were sitting out for almost 2 hours before we were able to bake them.

Here are our drying macarons. On the top pan you can see the spritz cookies, and on the second tray you can are the milano cookies.

4. While the macarons were drying, we made checkerboard cookies. They are made with sugar cookie dough, part of which is chocolate flavored. They are easier to make than it seems, you just have to be be able to cut very straight lines.

5. We made a batch of swiss butter-cream to use for our macarons and the next days cookies. Swiss butter-cream is the easiest to make, you just heat egg whites with sugar which you then whip into a stiff meringue. Once the meringue is cooled, you whip in butter and voila...butter-cream!
We flavored part of the butter-cream with raspberry to use for our macarons. The rest we left plain for the next day.

5. Once the macarons were dry, we baked them. This goes rather quickly, beacuse they were are small. Once they cooled, we fliped the shells over to filled them. We piped a coin of butter-cream onto the shells. We then added a dot of tart raspberry jelly onto the butter-cream.