Hazelnut Almond Cookies

I had rather a lot of egg whites to turn into almond cookies. Rather more in fact than I had almond meal on hand in the fridge. So I experimented with replacing 1/3 of the almond meal with hazelnut meal. I like the look and texture that resulted. Gave the cookies a little more depth.

For 3 egg whites, use 1 1/3 cups almond meal 2/3 cup hazelnut meal, 1/3 cup sugar, 1 tsp vanilla, and a pinch of salt.

Preheat oven to 300 degrees -- low and slow.

Whip the egg whites with a little cream of tartar to stiff peaks. Whip in sugar and vanilla. Fold in nut meals.

Scoop batter onto lined baking sheets. I like to use an scoop. You could spoon them on for a more irregular surface.

Bake at 300 degrees until set and just starting to brown. About 30 minutes, but times vary.

I have noticed a lot of variation from batch to batch depending on the ratios of eggs to meal to sugar. You can get something more like a meringue or more like a cookie.

Pancakes from scratch

I was in a "no recipe" mood this morning, and my wonderful wife asked for pancakes. (Go ahead, twist my arm.... OK, you can stop now. You had me at "pancakes").

Today I wanted to go with something a little eggier and to experiment with whipping the egg whites.

Pancakes with almond meal

I like incorporating a lot of almond meal in my cooking. I have tried waffles with almond meal in place of flour and they didn't hold together very well.

This time thought I'd try pancakes with half the flour replaced with almond meal. This worked well in terms of texture, browning, and flavor. The one problem was that they were quite tricky to flip without them tearing and breaking up.

They browned up nicely.

To top them, I mixed up some butter, maple syrup, and a little pomegranate syrup. This tasted nice, but I needed to warm the butter a little to get it to blend better.

Next time: I wonder if I made the batter a little thinner if that would make them easier or harder to flip. I think part of the problem was that the inside was staying too tender to hold together.  It also seemed to work a little better to make three smaller cakes rather than one large one at a time. 

Black Sauce Experiments

We made some Black Sauce in a medieval food class I took this weekend. I used it up last night.

So I made some more this evening to have with some meat and cheese. This batch I made with almond meal, red wine vinegar, my pepper spice blend, ginger, and galangal.

I want to do some experiments to determine My Favorite Black Sauce mix

• bread crumbs | almond meal | hazlenut meal
• Toasted | untoasted
• round pepper | long pepper | tail pepper | grains of paradise | a blend
• red wine vinegar | white wine vinegar | cider vinegar | balsamic | verjus
• ginger | galangal | both
• whole thing cooked | fresh 

I don't think I will try all 900 combinations. 

I suppose I'll do two passes of varying individual variables and just keep my best choices to date. 

I still need to decide which order to test the variables. 

...

Update (7/21/2013):

I tried making black sauce at a recent camping event using gluten free bread crumbs and did not like the result. Eulalia speculated that in the process of toasting the GF bread crumbs the xanthan gum  became bitter. 

Almond Cookies Gluten Free

In the interest of experimenting with Gluten Free baking, for my GF friends, I hunted for an almond cookie recipe. This is the one I came up with for today's experiment from http://www.gluten-free-around-the-world.com:

I thought they turned out pretty nice. A little chewy, a little nutty.