Broyé

Good morning!  Today it appears we might have our last real day of summer.  Yes, the calendar already says it's fall, but summer has been a little tardy in leaving.  We are expecting a warm day, but tomorrow and for several days after we are looking at much more temperate fall weather with maybe a few chilly mornings even.  There's never a bad day for hot chocolate but looking ahead into the fall and winter months to come I imagine many days that are tailor-made for hot chocolate and almond cream, or maybe peppermint cream, or .... you get the idea.

Yesterday I made a broyé.  This is an interesting traditional French sort-of-cookie, very buttery, very large, only lightly sweet, and shared at the table.  The whole thing is meant to be put in the center of the table and people just reach out and break off a chunk.  Some people call it a table cookie, some call it sharing shortbread, one well known figure in the world of food calls it salted butter break-ups.  I like to call it a table-shared cookie.

broyé fresh from the oven in a 17x12 inch pan

You can see by the photo above that it is quite large as this is a 17x12 inch pan.  You can also see that it's a bit lighter on one side.  I probably should have rotated the pan midway through baking.   (It takes about 30+ minutes to bake.)  But ... I got distracted.  First of all, I was cooking yesterday while I was watching an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and it was one of my favorite episodes from Season 6.  (Anyone who knows me knows that I am a long-time Star Trek viewer.) Second of all, I was visited by a hawk which seems to come by once in a while.  

Cooper's hawk

Between Star Trek and the hawk, it was easy to get distracted.

broyé whole

As you can see by the picture above where I placed the broyé on a flour sack towel (I love those towels and I have a large stack of them in a drawer in my kitchen,), it came out looking OK after all.  The color seemed to even out a bit as it cooled.

broyé broken

And now it is already broken and ready to be shared. This is a fun thing to have.  I like to make a couple of these at a time, and once I made one that filled the entire 17x12 inch pan!  I'm thinking about cooking it directly on my pizza stones sometime just to see what happens.  If I do, I will be sure to write about it here.  This is an easy thing to make and I heartily recommend that anyone reading this gives it a try.