Lenguas de Gato (Cat Tongues), 1989
For my first contribution to the blog, I wanted to go with a recipe that contained a small number of commonly available ingredients as well as easy to follow instructions. In The Young Baker I found a recipe for cat tongue cookies. It fit my criteria for simplicity with only 5 ingredients and 8 steps. Plus, it was named for my favorite furry companions, so how could I resist?
I have to admit that before baking these cookies and writing this blog post, I had never heard of cat tongue cookies. From the information I could find, they seem to have originated in Spain and appear to be rather popular almost everywhere, including France, China, Indonesia and many Latin American countries.
El Niño Panadero by Patricia van Rhijn, 1989
Lenguas de Gato
Instrucciones
Cat Tongues
Instructions
Comments
When I pulled these out of the oven, I was sure I had a failure on my hands. The dough had spread out much wider than I had anticipated and they no longer looked like cat’s tongues. I had piped out much-too-large cat tongues. If I’d had the illustration from the book in front of me while I was making them I would have realized that many more tongues of dough should have fit on the baking sheets. Despite their appearance, they tasted delicious. They are a light cookie with a crisp edge and a chewy center. The orange zest gives them a clean citrus flavor.
The deliciousness to difficulty ratio of these cookies is fairly high, so it’s extremely likely that I’ll be making them again sometime soon. While I loved the orange zest, I might experiment a bit with the flavoring. A quick Internet search reveals that many other flavors have been tried, including chocolate and matcha or sans flavoring, which leads to a crisp buttery cookies that melts on your tongue.
These sound great! They look thin and delicate, my favorite type of cookie. I was recently offered some little German chocolates called ‘Katsenzungen’. They had the same shape with cat faces on each end.