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It’s funny, but this month I’ve made a conscious effort to eat healthier things.  This unfortunately fizzled out about halfway through the month when my old roommate Ruth Ann came up to visit before the Inauguration and we ate lots of bad things like Chinese food and delicious cheese pizza and Burger King Whoppers (affectionately called Whippers because that’s what Drunken Lorrie called them).  It was a great time.  I also made brownies this month and pecan pie and I ate the rest of the candy leftover from Christmas (Marques knows the way to my heart is paved with Ritter Sport milk chocolate with cornflakes bars).  It didn’t really turn out to be a good month for me.

However, somehow, I HAVE lost all of the holiday weight I put on and am now back to my normal weight.  Which is still very fat.

So I’ll admit that I was NOT pumped about doing a Daring Bakers challenge this month since I wanted to eat lighter and while I would love to eat a 7 layer cake with delicious buttercream frosting, it’s probably not the best thing for me to eat at this particular point in time.  That’s why when they announced the challenge, I was pretty happy about it.

This month’s challenge is brought to us by Karen of Bake My Day and Zorra of 1x umruehren bitte aka Kochtopf. They have chosen Tuiles from The Chocolate Book by Angélique Schmeink and Nougatine and Chocolate Tuiles from Michel Roux.

Tuiles are those little thin, delicate shaped wafer cookies that are often served with fruit, sorbets, ice creams, or puddings.  They’re very light - the recipe is essentially butter, powdered sugar, egg whites and flour.  No chocolate, no caramel, no 6 different kinds of sugar, no egg yolks.

We had to shape our tuiles and serve them with something light.  Mixing the batter was easy, but I did have a difficult time forming my tuile shapes - I either underbaked my tuiles or I overbaked them.  I think the trick was (for me, anyway) to spread them VERY thin, like you can almost see the cookie sheet underneath it thin, and bake them until the edges just start to get brown.

I did two different kinds.  The first, I did a basic tuile U shape and in the center, placed a few rounds of delicious coffee ice cream and drizzled a bit of chocolate sauce over it.

(sidenote: Sorry for the dark pictures, I made my tuiles at 11:00 p.m.)

The other tuiles were cigar shaped, and I filled those with just a very basic whipped cream, accented with pink sugar sprinkles and dusted with cocoa powder.  Sort of like a fake cannoli.

So there you have it.  There’s this month’s Daring Bakers.  Full recipe can be yanked from one of the host’s websites up above.  Can’t wait for next month!