Peanut Butter Ingots

Here I am again, on Monday night at 9:30 pm, starting my post, even though I baked these last Tuesday. Why do I always procrastinate with posting? This week’s Heavenly Cake recipe is the peanut butter ingots. Without any further ado, let’s get baking.

First, you toast the almonds (preferably sliced, unlike mine), then put them in the food processor with the icing sugar. I never seem to get my nuts ground quite fine enough for my tastes. I’m guessing that has something to do with starting out with whole rather than sliced. That, or it’s my food processor’s fault. I think I’ll blame it.

Measure out the rest of the ingredients. The last time I needed beurre noisette, I made an entire pound of butter into beurre noisette. I did it the Alton Brown way: after it’s finished, pour an inch or so of water into the pan, then put the whole thing in the fridge. Let the browned butter solidify on the top, then pop out the solidified disk, and wrap it in wax paper. The browned solids stay at the bottom in the water. So, for this recipe, I fished my disk out of the freezer, broke off enough for the recipe, then put the disk back away. Makes it a lot quicker.

Add the flour to the icing sugar and almonds, mix that together.

Beat the egg whites until frothy. I’m finally starting to use up my frozen stash. Yay!

Next, you mix in the flour, sugar and almond combination deal, then slowly drizzle in the beurre noisette. I found out that my nice little prep bowl doesn’t do “drizzle” very well, so I ended up stopping the mixer, dumping in a bit of it, mixing that in, dumping in some more, etc. The batter didn’t seem to mind.

I don’t have infinite kitchen space (yet?) and my budget for nifty gadgets is currently about nil to help save up for the new kitchen, so I don’t own the special silicone ingot pan you’re supposed to bake these in, and I wasn’t about to buy new ones. Mom bought me Wilton’s silicone brownie pan last time she was visiting, so I used that for a bunch of these. I put the extra batter that didn’t fit into the silicone cupcake liner thingies that I used for the baby chocolate oblivions way back when.

Now here’s where I messed up on reading comprehension. I’m glad to see that others had the same issue, though. When I was reading the recipe, I first thought Rose was saying “if you have more batter than will fit in the molds, refrigerate it for at least an hour while you bake the other ones”. I couldn’t figure out why it would have to be at least one hour, but only if you had leftover batter. It didn’t make any sense to me at all. So, while they were in the oven, I sat down, re-read the paragraph, and realized that what she was saying was to pour it in the molds while still at room temperature, and refrigerate the batter for at least an hour IN the molds. If you had more batter than would fit in the molds, pour the batter into a piping bag before refrigerating the works. I think.

I don’t think these suffered from my lack of foresight, and since I made them on a weeknight, I’m kind of glad I didn’t quite grasp the instructions the first time around, because I would have put off making them.

The plate under the non-ingot shaped “ingots” is a gift from my aunt. She and her husband have downsized somewhat in house space, so her good china was sitting in a box in the grain bin at my grandparents’ farm. She asked if we’d take it off her hands as though we were doing her a favour. Since my husband and I never bothered to pick out a china pattern when we got married, we were thrilled, to say the least. From what I understand, this is a set of dishes that my parents contributed a decent amount of as gifts to Dad’s little sister, so it’s come around full circle in a way. Pretty, isn’t it? My other “good” dishes are the blue pottery you’ll see on next week’s post, from my parents.

I brought these into work today, along with the Succès for next week’s cake. This morning, before I’d sent out the email telling people about the treats, one of my coworkers stopped in to introduce one of our new developers to me. He noticed the cake and pointed it out to the new guy, and told him he needed to make sure he was nice to me. 🙂 I offered him some cake, and the new guy took one bite of the peanut butter “ingot” and his eyes lit up. “This is really good!” I really liked the top crust on these. The texture inside wasn’t my favourite, but that’s probably because I don’t have much success at grinding nuts finely. Definitely on my bake again list, though!