The second week of GBBO was cookies. These went much better and the results were significantly more enjoyable. If you like mint and chocolate and shortbread give these a go!
 | | Nailed it. Look 11 is almost 12? |
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 | | Better lit. |
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Overall I think I got pretty close here, I ran out of chocolate on cookie 11, probably because I made extra cookies and chocolate coasted the underside on all of them. The recipe is really frugal on the chocolate amounts so if sloppy or want more margin of error I'd suggest upping the amount.
The bigger problem is I didn't get a temper on the chocolate. They still melted in your hands and were not that shiny. I think reading around it's a side effect of my using chocolate chips as the starting chocolate. Internet people seem to suggest there are ingredients in chips to prevent them melting as fast in cookies and as a result it screws with tempering. I might try redoing these to see if I can achieve that.
Making the shortbread cookies went well dough formed up nicely, I had the needed cutters etc. One thing I had issue with was getting the round out of the cutter, seemed to stick to the sides, so I used the next size down cutter, inverted, to push the cookie blank out. This work for the fondant later too.
 | | Dough out of the mixer |
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 | | Dough Ball |
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 | | Almost got twelve without a re-roll |
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15 well formed and 1 special cookie, I was not going to waste the shortbread as I love shortbread cookies so I used all of the dough up. |
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The "fondant" didn't go that well at first. The white chocolate I started with did not want to melt. It just got grainy despite getting the temperature well above where it should melt. I think this was due to them having been in storage in an open bag for a year or so? Anyway I restarted and it went well.
Only got 15 of the mint bits out so I let the over browned cookie stand alone.
Covering in chocolate was much harder then I expected. The chocolate was pretty cool (~90F) when I started applying it and it didn't flow well. I had to brush it into all the corners. So note for next time, put it on when warmer. (Or if I had gotten it tempered maybe it flows easier? Definitely worth redoing.) Also my taste tester would have preferred a thinner coat of chocolate.
Getting attractive lines across the top also harder then expected, it was a very small amount of chocolate in the recipe and I had a hard time getting it out of the pastry bag evenly, I think doubling/tripling the amount used here to make it easier to pipe is also a good change.
I added stars as I got star baker in my house on this one.
Next week braiding dough!
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