frosting Tag

This is what I’ve been busy with for the past 7 days, recreating Mark & Spencer’s Viennese raspberry sandwich creams.  What does that say about me, spending 84 hours scrutinizing a processed junk-food from a super chainstore, I don’t know.  But I had to make it.

If you ever had childhood experience of reaching into a tin-box, and sneaking one of those buttery nuggets of vanilla cookies into your mouth as your first memory of pure foodgasm, then I guess, you can sort of understand.  But this, this is better, upgraded.  You can either go to your nearest M&S to see for yourself, or you can stay here and do it at home.  But how I got here, however unexpectedly long it took, was no vanilla road.  Checking out all the trusted recipes that were already out there, which, affirmingly, were all very similar to one another, let’s just say that I thought it was gonna be easy.  If they all agreed on it, it must work fine, right?  Humppphhh…

I made my first batch last weekend.  Well, it did work fine… how do I put it… wonderfully just okay I guess.  Wonderful in the sense that, flavor-wise, it was exactly what Viennese cookies are supposed to taste like, fireworks of buttery crumbs exploding in a vanilla sky.  No doubt about that.  But just okay because, and maybe I was being obsessively anal about it but still, I had a major textural issue with them.  It was one thing to have cookies with so much butter that they “melt in my mouth”, but it was something else entirely when they could barely hold themselves together even under the slightest pressure of a finger.  Like, I was scared to touch them… like literally, they eroded on my fingers.  I mean, if that sounds like a “dat a problem?” to you, then great, but I might add that they also had a paste-like and almost glue-ish texture in the mouth that… I just couldn’t quite get over.