10’ preparation, 30’ baking and rolling

Ingredients (for a dozen cigarettes)

• 50 g sugar (1.8 oz) (caster sugar)
• 50 g butter (unsalted)
• 50 g plain flour (non raising)
• 2 egg-whites (large eggs)
• 25 g almond meal (0.9 oz)
• pinch of salt
• ice cubes in a cup

Preparation

Lightly spray grease on a clean sandwich press bottom plate, or pancake maker.  Remove extra grease using a paper towel.

Beat the whites gently with a simple fork (not to create too many bubbles), do create foam if you can, stop as soon as you can to avoid that stage.
Add the sugar, salt , flour and the almond meal in the eggs preparation.
Add the molten butter (melted at room temperature if you can, or 10 s in the micro wave oven).   Stir well to get an homogeneous mix (called appareil in French)

Now you proceed as if you were doing pancakes, grease the surface with a bit of butter, fry the cigarette batter.   That’s to say in a very hot frying pan, 1’30 on each side.
You decide what colour the cigarette should have when you stop.
At the end of the 3 minutes, dip your finger tips in the icy cup for a couple of seconds, and try to roll the cigarette on site in the pan! This way the dough is still soft.

Get the cigarette away rapidly when rolled, to allow it to cool down and get firmer.

The extra touch

The Chef’s touch consists in preparing bigger diameter cigarettes, less sweetened (half the sugar), and fill them in with whipped cream (spray or fresh), then to paint cigarette tips with cooking chocolate (40% or so) (see picture below).

Note: to make fresh whipped cream (called crème Chantilly in French), energically whip very cold double thick sour cream for 5 minutes at least (by hand, unless you’ve got an electric hand beaters). Personally, I prefer by hand, so that you know exactly when you stop: there’s a point where the cream will be very thick, after that point, it becomes fluider again . . .
Sweeten the cream to your taste with icing sugar; allow the cream to cool down enough before filling in the cigarettes, as this operation will get the cream fluider, and it may pour out on the sides and we don’t want that . . .
To melt the chocolate, place a bits in a saucepan, itself over boiling water of a bigger saucepan (called bain-marie in French), and stir. You can add a flavour at this stage (brandy, Grand-Marnier . . . ) and a tblsp of water to make it smoother.
Then brush the tips of the cigarettes with a cooking brush.   Finally you can sprinkle the freshly chocolate brushed tips of the cigarettes with shredded dessicated coconut . . .