Palmiers
Palmiers (also known as angel wings or elephant ears) are a traditional Purim ear-cookie in France. You can make them with commercial or homemade puff pastry dough. Although I am perfectly capable of making puff pastry dough, I have only tried the commercial version so far. Note that either method requires some chilling time.
Ingredients
- 1 sheet puff pastry dough, near room temperature
- ½ c. sugar
- 2 tsp. cinnamon
- zest of one orange (optional)
- sanding sugar (optional)
Directions
- Mix cinnamon, sugar, and optional zest.
- Spread half the sugar mixture on the counter or a pastry board. Lay the pastry sheet on top, then spread the rest of the sugar on top.
- Roll the pastry out slightly thinner than it started, mostly to incorporate the sugar.
- Mark or note the middle of one side of the sheet. (If folding, also mark the quarter-way points to either side of your first mark.)
- Roll both ends up to the middle point that you marked. (If folding, fold the ends over to the quarter-way marks, then in again to the middle, forming 3 layers on each side. Then fold the sides together like a book.)
- Wrap and chill the log for half an hour or until you need cookies. Reserve any loose cinnamon sugar.
- Preheat oven to 400°F (375°F with convection).
- Slice the log into ½ inch pieces.
- Rub the bottom of each slice in your leftover cinnamon sugar and place on parchment paper on an insulated cookie sheet.
- Optionally, sprinkle the tops of the slices with sanding sugar or cinnamon sugar.
- Bake 10–17 minutes, depending on your oven and desired tanning level. Flip cookies halfway through.
- Transfer to a rack to cool (especially if you omitted the parchment paper step).
Variants
There are other opinions out there about how thin to roll out the dough, how to fold it up, slice width, whether to flip, and baking time.
The cinnamon and the insulated cookie sheet are, technically, also optional.
It is possible to fill the cookie with a savory topping rather than sugar. I also spotted something about Nutella…
The internet highly recommends using butter puff pastry rather than off-the-shelf commercial non-dairy puff pastry; that’s probably the best reason to turn this quick and easy recipe into the long dark night of homemade puff pastry dough.
