Bella is baking: Homemade Fortune Cookies

It is possible to make fortune cookies at home. It is not that difficult, but your hands must be super fast.

I tried a couple of recipes and compared them. The best recipe I found is from Martha Stewart's website.

The original recipe is very sweet to my taste. So I half the sugar. This recipe is very similar to Tuile (pronounced as tweel) and the taste is very good. Much much much better than those store bought fortune cookies.

Ingredients

37.5 gram unsalted butter
2 large egg whites (about 60 gr)
0.5 cup superfine sugar (I use 1/2 cup only)
1 cup all-purpose flour, sifted
Pinch of salt
3 tablespoons heavy cream
1 teaspoon almond extract

Directions

Write your message on a long strip of paper, around 10 cm long.
Heat oven to 180 degrees Celcius. Spray a cookie sheet liberally with cooking spray or use non stick pan. Melt butter in a small saucepan over low heat; set aside.
In the bowl of an electric mixer, combine egg whites and sugar, and beat on medium speed, about 30 seconds. Add flour and salt, and beat until combined. Add butter, heavy cream, and almond extract, and beat until combined, about 30 seconds.
Pour 1 tablespoon of batter onto half of the baking sheet, and spread with the back of a spoon into a thin 10-12 cm circle; repeat on the other half of the sheet. Bake until the edges of the cookies turn golden brown, about 8 minutes.
Transfer baking sheet to a heat-resistant surface. Working as quickly as possible, slide a spatula (an offset spatula, available at specialty kitchen shops, works best) under one of the cookies. Lift it up, and place it on a clean kitchen towel. Using your fingers (using gloves is advisable) fold the cookie in half, pinching the top together to form a loose semicircle. Press the cookies to the edge of a cup to form the shape of fortune cookies. This whole process should take about 10 seconds. Once the cookie hardens, which begins to happen almost immediately, you cannot fold it. Place the fortune cookie on a muffin pan to cool, and shape the second cookie. Repeat until all the batter is used up. To speed up the process, bake four cookies at a time, staggering two cookie sheets by 4 minutes to give you time to shape. To avoid wasting batter, practice folding with a circle of paper first.