This has to be one of the annoying Technical Challenges to date.
It's not particularly difficult and for once didn't lead to elevated levels of stress in any way. The problem is that the challenge required the bakers to make 9 tuiles and 9 cigars, but the recipe provided makes around 50. This is fine if you have all the time in the world and an industrial-sized oven, but working in a small kitchen with limited baking trays (and patience as the afternoon wore on) the whole process took literally hours longer than it needed to.
If I'd have known this I would have halved the quantities from the beginning, but once you're elbows deep in tuile paste and in the middle of a production line with a template, it doesn't make sense to stop, or throw away the rest of the mixture. I made the decision to carry on past the requirements of the challenge and use up all the mixture, but ended up losing over 3 hours in the process. Eugh.
Plus, I spent the evening nursing burnt and stinging fingertips from shaping piping hot tuiles, which is less than ideal to say the least!
The original recipe can be found on the BBC Food website here, but I found the GBBO website's version here a lot more helpful and made so much more sense (even if it is the same one just worded slightly differently!). It's also below with my notes and photographs. Both recipes also called for chocolate mousse, but I gave that a miss as the bakers on the show didn't have to make it too. If you'd like to make chocolate mousse to accompany the tuiles, then Lorraine Pascale's is pretty good, and can be found here.
Ingredients:
180g icing sugar, sifted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
6 large egg whites, at room temperature, lightly beaten
200g plain flour
3 teaspoons cocoa powder
50g dark chocolate
Method:
Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas 4.
Place the soft butter, icing sugar and vanilla extract into a mixing bowl and whisk together with an electric mixer to make a paste.
Gradually add the egg whites, whisking constantly.
Fold in the flour, a little at a time with a wooden spoon, stirring between each addition.
Transfer a sixth of the mixture to a small bowl, add the cocoa powder and beat with a spatula or wooden spoon until well mixed.
Cover both bowls with clingfilm and leave to rest at room temperature for 30 minutes.
The recipe requires a tuile template, but as I don't have one and have no intention of buying one, I had a Blue Peter moment and made one myself. All you need is a plastic sheet or the lid of an old ice cream tub. Draw round a 7cm cutter and carefully cut out the rounds. I only fit two on the ice cream lid which meant the trays of tuiles took ages to do, so the bigger the lid / piece of plastic the better. Remember to leave a few centimetres around each hole, because although the tuiles don't spread like cookies do, having room to manoeuvre makes removing them while hot a lot easier.
When the tuile paste has rested, set the template on a lined baking sheet. Spread plain tuile mixture over the cutout shapes using a palette knife, then draw the blade across the template to scrape off the surplus tuile mixture. Ideally at this stage, the thinner the layer of paste the better. Carefully remove the template by peeling it away from the sheet.
Spoon the cocoa tuile mixture into a small piping bag fitted with a writing tube (or a disposable bag with the end snipped off) and pipe patterns – dots/squiggles/wavy or straight lines – on the tuiles. I don't have many plain piping nozzles (read: two) so had to go for the larger one as the other was ridiculously small. As a result my swirls of chocolate paste are extremely thick and made the finished tuile really chewy - which is completely wrong!
Place in the heated oven and bake for 5-6 minutes until the tuiles are just turning golden around the edges. Remove the sheet from the oven and, working very quickly, lift each warm tuile off the baking sheet with a palette knife and drape over a rolling pin so the tuile cools in a curved shape. Leave to cool and set. I had so much mixture I ended up making around 25 of these, half of which either snapped or were undercooked. At least having so much extra meant there were spares to account for mistakes! I also ran out of rolling pins, so a cardboard tube from wrapping paper wrapped in baking parchment worked wonders!
To make the tuile cigars, spread the plain tuile mix over the template as before, but don’t add the cocoa decorations (there should be none of the chocolate paste left anyway). Bake as before. Remove the sheet from the oven and, working quickly, lift the warm tuiles off the sheet and gently curl them around wooden spoon handles to make neat cigar shapes. THIS IS SUPER PAINFUL. The tuiles are incredibly hot and cool really quickly, so I ended up basically having to hold piping hot biscuits around a wooden spoon for 2-3 minutes, as every time I let go they sprung out and unravelled. Utter nightmare. If anyone has any tips about shaping the cigars without burning your fingers then I'd really love to hear them!
Leave to cool and set, then slide them off the spoon handles and dip both ends in 50g melted chocolate. Leave to set on a sheet of baking paper.
Annoyingly for the first time ever I was set to finish the challenge in the allotted time, but having to keep baking the never ending mixture meant I spent all afternoon faffing spreading paste and pulling tuiles in and out of the oven. After a while I stopped shaping them when cooked, and even using the template with the paste, instead just smearing the paste across baking trays. It baked extremely quickly then, and the uneven sheets were perfect to break up and accompany ice-cream (it might be winter but my parents still love it…).
These tuiles were really chewy too, so there's no way I'd have won the Technical Challenge this week! They're supposed to "snap" and have a real crunch, but aside from a couple of cigars these were mostly soft and bendy. With the first batch I know it's because they were too thick - in future I'll pipe smaller chocolate swirls to keep them thinner and therefore more crunchy. I have no idea what went wrong with the cigars, but given how painful they were to shape there's no way in hell I'm making them again!
So bendy and so wrong!
So unfortunately it wasn't too much of a success this week! Hopefully next week will be much more positive! If you have any tips for tuiles then do get in touch: although I vaguely know where I went wrong it'd be lovely to hear from someone that actually knows what they're talking about, rather than me stabbing in the dark with limited knowledge!
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