Orange and Fennel Tuiles

As many of you know, I co-host a monthly blogging challenge called Alphabakes, where Ros and I take it in turns to choose a letter of the alphabet at random, and ask other bloggers to submit bakes beginning with that letter, or using a main ingredient that begins with that letter. We've been doing it for nearly a year and a half now and we're having a great time! The letter that came up this month was F, and a few things sprang to mind, like flapjacks and fudge, but I wanted to see what my collection of around 100 recipe books would offer up. And so I came across this recipe in Marian Keyes' Saved by Cake for orange and fennel tuiles.

You need:

50g butter

1/2 tsp fennel seeds

2 egg whites

110g icing sugar

50g plain flour

zest of 1 orange

I had a small pot of fennel seeds in the back of the cupboard that I'd never found a use for, so they were perfect for this recipe! You need to grind the fennel seeds in a pestle and mortar first, and also melt the butter and put to one side to cool. Preheat the oven to 180C.

In a clean bowl, whip the egg whites until they form soft peaks.

Gently fold in the icing sugar and flour

 Finely grate the zest of one orange, and add to the mixture along with the fennel and the melted butter.

Mix in until you have a thick batter.

Line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper and spoon the batter onto the sheet, leaving a good space in between. The mixture will spread; mine turned out quite large so 1 tbsp of mixture is probably enough.

These only take about ten minutes to bake. The idea is that when they come out of the oven - literally the moment you take them out - they are pliable enough to be shaped into a curve, a little like a Pringle. You can apparently do this by curving them around a rolling pin, and the recipe recommends taking them out of the oven just a couple at a time. Even though I did that, they cooled too fast and I was unable to curve them. Still, they tasted good! In fact, I was very pleasantly surprised by these cookies. They are thin and a little brittle, but really chewy (in a good way) with a hint of orange and fennel. We ate them after dinner as that's when I made them, but I think they would be great with a cup of coffee in the afternoon.

I'm sending these to Alphabakes, which I am hosting this month; come back to my site for the roundup of everyone's recipes at the end of the month!

I'm also sending this to Cooking With Herbs, hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage.

 

I'm updating this to add it to the Classic French blogging challenge, as their theme this month is tuiles - and I'm about to go on holiday so won't have time to bake these again! The challenge is hosted by Jen at Blue Kitchen Bakes.