#amandines

Amandines de Provence / Biscuits H. Lalo. 1900. Leonetto Cappiello.

38 1/4 x 54 3/8 in./97 x 138 cm

"We are happy to tell you that we are very satisfied with both the design and the printing. . . We found it at once original and very personal," wrote the owner of the company that created Amandines de Provence (Cappiello, p. 116). It's the first poster Cappiello created for a product; you can almost taste the crisp almond crunch, and hear the lady insinuating, "Darling, isn't this divine?" A variant of this poster has bottom text "Biscuits Pernot," but "Amandines de Provence" is the original branding.

Creamin' that butter like there ain't no tomorrow until it's light and fluffy was the foundation of these piped cookies.

My partner and I worked on palets aux raisins. The batter was really simple to make - mix all the wet ingredients and then stir in the dry. Then it went into a pastry bag fitted with a 1/2" round tip to be piped into little mounds. These mounds were placed in a fiery furnace of 350 degrees and there, they spread out into these flat beauties. 

Here are some of other cookies that other groups made (the techniques for these are also very similar).

Amandines

Chocolatines

Crisp Amaretti (topped with roasted pine nuts and pearl sugar)

We also made some checkerboard cookies and American-style biscottis but I totally forgot to take a picture of them so here's one of El Pescado (a coincidentally fish-shaped cookie made from the checkerboard scraps).

The checkerboard cookies were made of vanilla and chocolate flavored pate sablee, which is pretty easy to make. We roll it out to 1/4" thick and then let it chill. We brushed an egg-white wash on one of the layers to glue the other to it.  This process was repeated until it gave us a log of checkerboard cookies.

As for the biscotti, we mixed the ingredients together by hand, shaped logs from it and then baked it. We sliced it and then rebaked it to get the hard biscotti consistency.

After all of these cookies, we also made a flavored creme anglaise. It's a cousin of the pastry cream and doesn't get as nearly as thick (since it doesn't have the corn starch thickening agent). Here's mine - it's earl grey flavored.

From it, we made ice cream! Oh man industrial ice cream machines really churn out that stuff in a matter of minutes. It's crazy. It's like wait 5 minutes and then BAM YOU SCREAM I SCREAM WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM.