Description
These easy crispy, sweet cookies are made with only two ingredients - puff pastry and sugar! Mine use a homemade puff pastry but these work beautifully with store bought pastry too. These buttery cookies are delightfully flaky, perfectly caramelised, and super fun to make.
Ingredients
- Half a batch of homemade puff pastry (about 375g) - see recipe notes for making with store bought puff
- 150g raw or turbinado sugar for rolling out, plus more for sprinkling if needed
Instructions
- Sprinkle the work surface with sugar. Place down the piece of puff pastry, and sprinkle with more sugar.
- Roll the dough to 12x16" (30x40cm), sprinkling more sugar as you roll and flipping the pastry to ensure that you have an even sugar coverage. Pat more sugar onto the surface of the pastry.
- Trim the edges of the pastry so that it is an even 12x16 (30x40cm) rectangle, and align with the short edge facing you. Mark a midline along the short edge (6" / 15cm).
- Starting with one of the long edges, roll the pastry up into a tight spiral, rolling toward the midline.
- Once you meet the midline, repeat with the second edge. Make sure that the roll is nice and tight.
- Cut the log of dough into two 8" (20cm) pieces, and wrap tightly in plastic wrap. Place onto a sheet pan or something flat and freeze for 30 minutes to firm up.
- Line a sheet pan with parchment paper. Remove the logs of dough from the freezer and unwrap. Place additional sugar in a small bowl.
- Using a sharp knife, cut the logs of dough into 1cm (about 0.5") slices. Coat each in the sugar by shaking it around in the bowl, then transfer to the lined baking sheet - it is ok to place them close together as they are going into the freezer.
- Freeze the sliced cookies for 20 minutes. While the palmiers are in the freezer, preheat the oven to 400°f / 200°c.
- I bake these one tray at a time and leave the remainder in the freezer. Transfer half the cookies to a room temperature (not cold) parchment paper lined sheet pan, spacing out evenly and leaving more space than you think - they spread quite a lot.
- Bake the palmiers for 10 minutes - they will unroll in the oven. Remove from the oven and using an offset spatula or knife, flip each cookie - you can use the spatula to scoot the spirals back into shape.
- Sprinkle the other side of the cookie with more sugar, then return to the oven. Bake for a further 6-7 minutes until golden brown - the amount that you bake them depends on how you prefer your palmiers.
- Remove from the pan and allow to cool for 10 minutes on the pan then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
- Repeat the baking process with the remainder of the palmiers.
- Store palmiers in an airtight container at room temperature for 3-4 days.
Notes
If you are making homemade puff pastry, make the full batch and store half in the freezer if you are not using, or use to make a batch of my cheese straws!
To make palmiers with store bought puff pastry, I usually use two pieces of puff pastry - in NZ ours come frozen in 25cm (10") sheets. I roll the sheet of pastry to slightly wider to 30cm (12"), using the same process and rolling in sugar. I then wrap up the two logs together to freeze, and follow the rest of the recipe as written.
Palmiers are a great make ahead cookie - follow the recipe up to the point of freezing them, then once they are frozen, transfer to an airtight container for up to a month. Bake from frozen.