Friday, May 29, 2015

A Near Pin-saster: Edible Cigars

Along with the Monthly Pinstrosity Challenge, I also follow and participate the Iron Craft challenge (I was actually introduced to it through a submitter here on Pinstrosity!). It's really fun to do both and to poke a stick at my creativity. As I often do, for one of the projects I decided to kill two projects with one pin. The two challenges were "E is for..." and "Gifts". It took me a while to figure it out but the day before the Iron Craft project was due I figure it out (it's always the day before).

Emilee and Chip just graduated and I wanted to give them something fun for graduation. Emilee loves cigar boxes, so I thought it would be fun to find a treat to put in it. Enter Pinterest! I found a neat pin for making "Cigares au Chocolat" and knew that was it! Edible Cigars for Emilee's Excellent Educational Efforts.  Amazingly I had all the supplies at home. The only hard part, the recipe was in french and metric measurements. I decided to try it anyway using Google Translate and ButterBaking.com for the translation and conversions. This was going to be awesome!
I got it mixed up and it looked like this:

Now I had no idea if that was how it was supposed to look, but it seemed okay so I just went with it. The first pan I didn't flatten the cookies enough and they were just blobs. The second pan I tried to flatten them with my fingers but the dough was super sticky and they had holes and didn't work well either. Finally the third pan I pulled out a spoon and a cup of water and dipped the spoon in the water and used that to flatten the dough. That worked fairly well. But they really weren't flat enough still.

They wouldn't roll. I had to start rolling them right away without them cooling because they stiffened up super super fast and ended up cracking and crumbling. It just wasn't working.
I set the bowl on the counter above the trashcan and went and browsed Pinterest, hoping I could find some other E project that I could whip out. While scrolling through I came across a pin for cookies I'd actually already made...successfully! I don't know why I didn't think of those earlier! They were so similar.

I had an idea for what I needed to do...I needed more of a batter than a dough. However, I was out of eggs so I couldn't add extra egg whites. I didn't have cream, I didn't have milk (we were so seriously out of groceries that day!), so I added about 1 TBS of water (maybe more, but not much) and stirred that into the dough to make more of a batter. It looked good, but now to see if it actually worked or if I'd ruined the remainder of the dough. Amazing the Pinterest Gods smiled upon my efforts and it worked! The batter spread thin enough without being too runny and thin, but still make a good pliable cookie. I'd almost given up on this! I'm so glad I didn't! Luckily I had just enough batter left to make a dozen cookies.

I got them baked, rolled, and then dipped in chocolate. I dipped the end in cocoa powder to look like the ash on the end of the cigar.


Last, I found a cigar box at the local antique mall to put them in. It was nice and cleaned out and didn't smell like tobacco, so it worked great!




So in the end these weren't spectacular (especially when you see the original inspiration), but they were fun to make and they made a fun gift to give!

All too often I think we give up too fast. I was pretty frustrated and ready to be done with these. Sometimes all you need is to put yourself in timeout from the project and come back to it later. Now I think I need to make these again, because I didn't even get to try a completely finished one! To get my version of the recipe (and the filling I made for these!), you can check out the blog post on Mower Cooking.

Sometimes though, even putting yourself in a project timeout doesn't work. Ever have a project that's a Pinstrosity before you even really get underway? I tried to take apart the light fixture and separate the dome from the light and chain for a project I had in mind. I got it all taken apart only to realize without unscrewing the entire thing from the ceiling and disconnecting wires there was no way I could get that dome off (without breaking it at least, and since we're in a rental that's not really a great option). So I went to put it back together...and it wouldn't go back together! I fought with it for an hour and finally had to let it just hang there lopsided and disassembled until Cameron came home. His years at the furniture store have served him well and he had it back together in no time! I felt a little sheepish though. "You run Pinstrosity...shouldn't you know better?" he teased. Of course not! I'll probably be making Pinstrosities as a 96 year old lady and he'll still be shaking his head and laughing at me.


1 comment:

  1. This is a tuile, and the batter should be rather thin, so you can pipe it, and you must roll them while hot.

    http://thegreatbritishbakeoff.co.uk/marys-tuiles-chocolate-mousse-technical-challenge/

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