A month of melting moments!

So after starting this blog I realised it was only a matter of time before i'd have to reveal my stance on the cookie slash biscuit world, after all cupcakes are wonderful but it takes a lot less to eat yourself into a cupcake coma whereas with biscuits and cookies you can munch away with out a care in the world until suddenly your jeans don't fit anymore. And for me there is one king in the cookie world that rains supreme, the melting moment. Two buttery biscuits lighter than shortbreads but more crumbly than a sugar cookie sandwiched together with a generous slather of buttercream and sometimes some form of jam or preserve. Some melbournians know them as Yo Yo's but my New South Wales influenced upbringing, I feel, gives the cookie a name that perfectly describes what it is, a melting moment. It has become tradition for me every time I go out for coffee with my mum to some new cafe to sample their melting moments, and let me tell you it has gotten to the point where in selecting a cafe a conversation like this often occurs:

My Sister: "Can we go to this cafe, i really like it"
Mum: "The Melting Moments are dry"
My Sister: "Okay, what about this other one"
Me: "They don't put enough filling in between the biscuits"
My Sister: "Oh my god..."

We've become melting moment snobs, its true. My mum believes her recipe can't be challenged and i've caught her on more than one occasion taking one of her melting moments to a cafe with her because she knows it will be better. But i still have faith! so i've made it my goal for the next month to judge as many of these melting moments as i can find. At the end of the month i will share with you my mum's brilliant recipe and let you be the judge. So here we go, lets kick off a month of melting moments!

Choclatte Camberwell

The first stop on our melting moment quest is choclatte, a popular cafe in camberwell. I have to say i'm biased here because I love this place, it has the rare perfect balance on the menu between cakes, cookies, lunch-y things and warming drinks, with the added bonus of being a specialty chocolate store. Whenever i'm there I pick up some of the quality cooking chocolate they sell, it takes brownies to a whole new level of fudge, I just can't resist. Plus the service has always been lovely, once i went there when my mum had a sling from a dislocated shoulder injury and they couldn't have been anymore helpful and nice to us. My one critique of this cafe is that it is in camberwell, one of my least favourite places to go purely because of the stigma attached to being a private school girl and sitting out the front of one of these quote unquote 'cool' cafe's (cough, moravia, cough, long black), but hey thats my pride talking not my stomach.

So we got there around the afternoon tea rush but managed to get a table inside. My mum ordered her customary strong cappuccino and my sister ordered a chai latte, which came in a very generous glass which is very uncharacteristic for a lot of these overpriced cafes, and I of course got this melting moment:

Technically a Monte Carlo because of the strawberry jam addition, but i maintain that they are the exact same biscuit and cream recipe. And I'd say a solid start. A good amount of jam and buttercream, generous but not sickly or overpowering. The entire thing was massive, a lot larger than the stock standard melting moment however the biscuits themselves were quite thin so it wasn't hard to get through the whole thing (as if i would have struggled anyway). The consistency of the biscuits was the main let down, despite that promising bright yellow colour the biscuit was dry and not quite buttery enough. The colour can be put down to a distinct type of industrial custard powder i'm sure many cafe's around melbourne are using, my mum summed it up best when she said "you can tell its not homemade". But that buttercream saved it, light and airy the way it should be, so all in all a promising first cookie.

I really can't wait to take this quest more inner city, the dungy alleys of the city, the humble storefronts of south melbourne and brunswick, THAT my friend is where you find melting moment gold, where you find bitter old ladies like my mother out the back of the store with angry vendetta's against margarine.