This week’s recipe almost did me in. I have no idea why something as simple as this brought me to my knees.

But as Marie mention before, we tend to get cocky after we bake a complicated cake. And well, I was cocky going into this one. I read the recipe a couple of times, so I knew the steps going in. This was a quick and easy. It was only cooking the batter, no frosty, no glaze. How hard could it be?

Well, it started with me looking for the mold to bake them in. Like Raymond, I found them in Amazon.com a couple of weeks ago, and as I was ready to purchase them, I got a message that they were out of stock and I needed to wait up to 2-3 weeks. So, I hunted them down all over town. No luck. Apparently fancy molds are that too fancy for my town’s bakery suppliers.

I decided to use my cupcake pan instead. So much for ingots. (I should have given up at this point, because the universe was trying to tell me something).

For once, I had all the ingredients in my pantry. No need to run to the store to get anything specific for this one. Even the recommended “Jiff” peanut butter was there. I even had egg whites in the freezer – no need to waste any yolks, I was so proud, I did a little dance in the kitchen. I was sooo going to ace this one. (HAH! that was the universe)

So on Saturday, I set all of my ingredients, took out my scale and started to measure them out.

Almonds, Powdered Sugar, Egg whites, flour, butter and wait! Where is the measurement for the peanut butter?!?

Upon closer look, I realized that I was measuring the ingredients for the WRONG recipe. Instead of the Peanut Butter Ingots I was reading from the Plum Round Ingots.

HELLO! Can you say BLOND MOMENT HERE?

*Sigh*

I empty out everything and started again… this time reading from the RIGHT PAGE.

I put my almonds in the oven to start toasting and at the same time placed the butter in a sauce pan in order to start making the “Beurre Noisette” which is just a fancy way of saying “brown butter”. I made mine super fast, using very high heat and a very watchful eye. Poured it into a measuring cup and set aside. I took my almonds out and put them in the freezer to speed up the “cooling” process.

Next step was mixing the powdered sugar and almonds in the food processor until fine. Which it took a bit of pulsing and I still thought it was not fine enough. Set that aside and pulled the mixer out and whipped the egg whites until foamy, mixed in the sugar/almond mixture, and then I started pouring the brown butter slowly.

At this point I’m looking at the batter waiting for the emulsion stage to set in and reward me with a creamy, glossy mixture…but, nothing, and as I continue to wonder why it was not looking like the cake batter described in the book, I felt something staring back at me. Yep, there it was, across from me, staring back all alone, laying low – my flour.

S***! (I actually said it in Spanish and it had more words but, I’m all about translating).

So much for reading the recipe over and over again.

An executive decision was made and I dumped it right in and hoped for the best. Then I proceeded to continued to drizzle the brown butter in… Since Rose’s mentions that this stage needs to happen in 5 minutes, I made sure to set the timer to that allotted of time, you know, since I was just SMOKING my track record with this recipe.

I followed the tip of pouring the batter into a measure cup to help me fill the baking mold. Now, the recipe mentions that it will yield 16 of these blocks… I got only 12 out of the batter, even after scrapping every last drop.

After about 18 minutes they were done. Took them out and there they were - All nice and brown and dome up. Nothing, at all like the picture. I decided that I needed to get the right pan for these at that moment.

But, the house smelled heavenly. Tom venture out to sniff and ask what the “hell smelled so good”. And when he saw the cupcakes he was like all over them.

I’m sorry to say, we could not wait.

Ok, we did wait about the 5 minutes to turn them out into a cooling rack. But, then we broke one and tasted it.

He looked at me, I looked at him and we both declared that the rest were not going to survive past the weekend.

In fact, I was so worry about them; I took 4 out of the batch to get the photo-op. By the time I came back into the kitchen to put them back, we were down to 4, not counting the 4 I had with me.

They lasted a total of 3 hours after I took them out of the oven.

Verdit:

Tom: “you need to go back in the kitchen and make some more”

Me: I love them. They are perfect little snacks. All nutty and the brown butter gives them a hazelnut flavor that combined with the peanut butter it’s just sublime. I’m going to make them again this coming weekend, right after I get the pan that I ordered from Amazon.com.

Apparently the executive decision worked.