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Palet Breton: French Butter Biscuits

A couple of French butter biscuits with a tea cup and a white plate on background.

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5 from 11 reviews

Fill your empty cookie jar with an incredibly crispy, buttery and melt-in-your-mouth French butter biscuits - palet Breton. These are a year-round favorite - a divine sweet treat from Brittany to accompany your afternoon cup of tea or coffee. 

Ingredients

Scale
  • 2 1/2 large egg yolks
  • 2/3 cup + 2 1/2 teaspoons (90 g) powdered (icing) sugar
  • 4.2 oz (120 g) unsalted butter, softened
  • 1 cup + 4 tablespoons (155 g) all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon (5 g) baking powder

* If needed, please refer to Baking Conversion Charts.

Instructions

  1. Place egg yolks and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer and whisk them until whitish. Add the softened butter and beat until homogeneous. Using a flour sifter, sift flour, salt, and baking powder, add to the butter mixture, and mix to get the dough (do not overmix!). Wrap the dough in a plastic film and refrigerate for three to four hours.

  2. Preheat oven to 300 F/150 C. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and arrange pastry rings on. Take the dough out of the fridge and roll it out between two sheets of parchment to a thickness of about 2/3 inches/1.5 cm. Using a cookie cutter of about 2 inches/5 cm in diameter, cut the dough into small disks, and place them in the un-buttered pastry rings the cavities of a muffin pan.

  3. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes. Remove the biscuits from the oven and let them cool a bit in the rings or the muffin tin. Then carefully remove biscuits from the rings by pushing them from the bottom. In the case of the muffin mold, turn it out and gently remove the biscuits. Use the tip of a knife to facilitate the removal of palets if needed.

Notes

  1. Since the dough is quite sticky, work as fast as you can. If the dough softens at any step, bring it to the fridge (or even freezer) for a few minutes to firm it up.
  2. To help coax dough disks from the parchment paper after rolling the dough, use a pastry scraper or metal spatula.
  3. As an alternative to rolling the dough with a rolling pin between two sheets of parchment, roll the dough out as a cylinder of 2 inches/5 cm in diameter, wrap it in a plastic film, refrigerate and then cut in equal disks of about 1/3 inches/1.5 cm.
  4. The biscuits are extremely crumbly when hot. Allow them to cool down in their pastry rings (or a muffin mold) before removing them.

Nutrition

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