French Fridays with Dorie - Salted Butter Breakups

Confession time.  When I got Dorie's book...I read the whole thing...cover to cover.  I loved the stories, the anecdotes, the recipes, the pictures...everything about it.  One downside of having read the entire book is that some of the recipes are stuck in my head and some of the recipes are a little jumbled up in my head.  Salted Butter Breakups is a perfect example.  I love all the different cracker recipes in the book and have been wanting to make some (especially for a friend who loves crackers).

Well, it was this friend's birthday two weeks ago and I was having her and her family to dinner to celebrate.  I thought, hey...I'll make the salted butter breakups to serve with a nice cheese as our appetizer.  I'll kill two birds with one stone (the Dorie assignment and making a nice cracker for my cracker loving friend.)  I never looked at the recipe when I made this plan...just assuming this was one of the cracker recipes in Dorie's book.

The day of the dinner party rolled around and I was busy cooking all day.  I made Dorie's Devil's Food White-Out Cake from her Baking book (which turned out great and tasted great and not a single damn picture of it was taken...just look at page 246 of her book...mine looked just like that.  Well almost, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.)  I also made thick cut brined pork chops and home made sauerkraut.  All was super yummy.  And we started the evening with the Salted Butter Breakups and a wedge of St. Andre's cheese.

Some of you are probably laughing right about now.  Who serves cookies for the appetizer course?  Well, I guess I do.  When I don't pay attention and bake what I think is a cracker, but really turns out to be a cookie.  Half way into the recipe...which only has about three ingredients...I realized that perhaps this wasn't a cracker I was making...it had an awful lot of sugar for a cracker.  I finally looked closely at where the recipe was situated in the book and saw that it's in the Desserts section.

Oh well!  At that point, I was committed.  I love the Carr's Wheat crackers with brie...they're kind of sweet and go great with the creamy brie.  I decided the Salted Butter Breakups would be fine with the St. Andre's.  And you know what?  They were.  Or, at least I thought so.  Everyone else ended up eating the Wheat Thins I put out (which were the only real crackers I had).  I proceeded to eat the rest of the breakups all week long.  I loved the sweet, buttery crunchiness.  As you can see from the photo below, I rolled this cracker cookie a little unevenly, with the edges being thinner than the middle.  So, the edges browned a lot.  They were really crunchy...and almost had a burnt flavor (definitely a deeply browned butter flavor).  But the center of the cracker cookie was fabulous.  Another bonus was I got to use the fabulous sel gris we brought back from France (we bought a five pound bag for about $2).

One thing about this recipe.  When I saw the picture in the book, I laughed when Dorie said to take a fork and make the cross hatches (like you would on a peanut butter cookie).  I thought hers looked way to uniform to have been made with that method, plus there was a lot of real estate to press your fork into.  I also thought I could get the same result if I pressed a cookie rack into the dough before baking.   Um, not so much.  That didn't work well and my dough was a bit on the wet side (definitely needed 3 tablespoons of water, not 4), so it stuck to the cookie rack.  It was kind of a mess.  Once I got it unstuck, I tried the fork method.  Not too successfully.  I'm really looking forward to how everyone else made these and if they have any tips on making the hash marks.

When I made the cracker cookie, I was only able to get a shot of the whole thing.  I thought that was kind of sad at the time and thought I might have to make the recipe again so that I could get some photos of the broken up pieces, since that's really the magic of this recipe.  Low and behold, I checked out the bowl on my counter and found a few small pieces still left in a Ziploc (two weeks after making them).  So, I took them outside and took a couple of photos (sorry about the shadows...I was too lazy to go back inside and get my homemade light filter.).  And then I ate the pieces.  And you know what?   They were still yummy and not stale at all.  Yippee!