0 Mallows and Milans

This month's Daring Bakers' hostess Nicole at Sweet Tooth chose chocolate covered marshmallow cookies (aka mallows) and milan cookies from the Food Network website. Both are from pastry chef Gale Gand and are homemade versions of Nabisco's Mallomars and Pepperidge Farm's Milanos. I've never tried Mallomars and didn’t even know about their existence until Harry (played by Billy Crystal) declared them the greatest cookies of all time in "When Harry Met Sally". Milanos were a favorite snack while I was in college. Back then there were only two varieties - original and mint. Orange, raspberry and others came along much later.

I really enjoyed the mallows. The cookie dough was very straightforward and easy. My only problem was the stated yield in the recipe was completely wrong. I rolled my dough 1/8-inch thick as stated and I was on my way to getting 12 dozen 1-inch diameter cookies. Luckily I only cut out about 50 cookies and saved the rest of the dough for the future.


I've never made marshmallows from scratch and was excited to try it. It's pretty amazing that the fluffy, runny, sticky mess sets up so nicely. It was a lot of fun and tasted much better than store bought. Instead of piping the marshmallow onto the cookies, I made them in a potato starch coated baking pan and cut them into disks after they had set up. Of course I didn’t really think it through and the marshmallow disks wouldn't stick to the cookie. I tried using fruit jam or peanut butter to stick them onto the cookie base but I felt that it detracted from the delicate flavors of the marshmallow and cookie. So I just placed them on the cookie base. The chocolate glaze coating held them in place just fine.


The recipe for the milan cookies appeared very straightforward. But I messed up somehow. Maybe I misunderstood the piping instructions, but I ended up with a lot of tiny cookies. Like the recipe instructed, I used a 1/4-inch plain tip and piped out 1-inch long sections which could give me enough to make over 200 miniature cookies instead of 3 dozen Milano-sized sandwich cookies. Maybe I was supposed to pipe out 1-inch wide sections instead of 1-inch long sections? I actually stopped after piping two sheet pans worth so I ended up baking about 80 miniature cookies.


The flavor of the cookie was okay, but the texture of my cookies was nothing like a Milano. Mine were much thinner than those used in Milanos and were like chewy tuiles. Not good. Maybe my batter was too runny? I didn’t have time to redo the cookie batter so I continued on with the recipe anyway. I made the chocolate ganache filling and assembled the sandwich cookies. I did not enjoy these at all. I should have cut my losses early by only assembling a few cookies for the photographs, saving the ganache for something else and then tossing the rest of the cookies into the compost bin. Yes, I disliked my cookies that much. I felt they were a total waste of good chocolate.

So this month was 50-50 for me. My mallows were good. My milans were bad. I'm sure the other Daring Bakers fared better than I did.

The fine print:
The July Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Nicole at Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.


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