My husband and I love watching Bon Appetit’s Gourmet Makes. If you don’t know it, I highly recommend the show. It’s filmed in the Bon Appetit Magazine’s test kitchen and hosted by pastry chef Claire Saffitz. Basically, she tries to recreate, or improve on some kind of commercial candy or snack. It’s a great concept and sometimes she struggles, sometimes she has real moments of success.
Iced VoVo vs Mikado
I’ve been meaning to try my luck at making a gourmet version of something you buy at the shop for a while, and a few days ago, my husband challenged me to make an improved version of the classic Iced VoVo biscuit you can buy at the shops here in Australia. The Arnott’s one. He remembers them from his childhood and buys them from time to time, only to be a little disappointed with the topping. He wanted it to be more of a marshmallow consistency, less fondant like. A quick Wikipedia search however tells me that an Iced VoVo has always been with fondant, and that the Irish variety is with marshmallow (they’re called Mikado).
The mash up
In the end I came up with a mix of the two. It’s not quite marshmallow consistency, not quite fondant. And the base is a little richer, with lots of egg yolks, rather than a simple butter biscuit. The purists might say I should have stuck to the original square shape, but I’m neither Australian, nor Irish, so I guess I had creative liberty, hehe. A flower seemed like the right shape for my version, and that way I could make it look a little like a jam drop cookie.
Best enjoyed with a steaming cup of hot milk and honey! Enjoy!
Iced VoVo jam drop flower cookies
Ingredients
Cookie base
- 150 g plain flour
- 20 g coconut flour
- 30 g corn flour
- 100 g unsalted butter cold
- 100 g caster sugar
- pinch of salt
- 4 egg yolks
Topping
- 200 g pink marshmallows
- 20 ml water
- 20 g unsalted butter
- 50 g icing sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
- 60 g raspberry jam
- 2 tablespoons desiccated coconut
Instructions
Cookie base
- Place the flours and the butter into a food processor and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse sand.
- Add sugar, salt and egg yolk and pulse until just combined and a bit lumpy. Empty the contents onto your workbench and bring together into a ball of dough.
- Wrap in plastic and chill in the refrigerator for one hour.
- Preheat the oven to 180°C.
- Remove the dough from the fridge and roll out to 2mm thickness. Using a flower-shaped (or really, whatever you got!) cookie cutter and cut out about 50 cookies.
- Place onto lined baking trays and bake for 15-20 minutes. You want the middle to be cooked, but the cookies should not take on a lot of colour. When done, remove and cool on cooling racks.
Marshmallow fondant topping
- Place the marshmallows, butter, vanilla and water into a ceramic or glass bowl and melt them in the microwave, 10 seconds at a time, stirring in between.
- Once fully melted and smooth, sift in the icing sugar and mix thoroughly. The mixture will still be quite runny but it will thicken when it cools.
- Once the fondant is thick enough to pipe, fill it into a piping bag with a 3mm nozzle and pipe a 2-3mm thin layer around the perimeter of each cookie, leaving a hole for the jam in the middle.
- Dip each cookie, fondant side down, into desiccated coconut and shake off the excess.
- Finally, pipe a drop of raspberry jam into the middle.
