Creative Insomnia Part 1 / Rochers Coco

Last week, from Monday right up until Friday, I woke up at 3am every single night without fail and every single night without fail I couldn't get back to sleep again. I go through phases like this and learned many years ago to embrace them rather than fight them. The middle of the night is, in fact, a wonderful time to be wide awake. Everything is quiet and time feels sort of...suspended. It's the perfect time for reading, sewing (I'm currently making a fabric rug but won't bore you with the ins and outs until I have a finished product to show off) writing (except for this blog which I totally neglected last week) cleaning and also, of course, cooking. I think it was Wednesday night at 3am when I woke up with my first thought being 'desiccated coconut.' Yes I did. I really can't say why, but that's the first thing I thought of. So, upon realising that this night was going to go the same way as the previous two, I jumped out of bed and headed to the cupboard to dig out the coconut. What should I do with it? Make a coconut cake? No, all my butter was in the fridge and I'd have to wait a good hour for it to soften before being able to start. At this point, I turned the packet over and whaddyaknow? There's a recipe for 'rochers coco' on the back! Okay so it's cheating because it's not really a recipe of my own, but they were so good and so very quick and easy to make that I wanted to share it. I modified it a little because I was a little scared of how sweet they'd be so here's my version:

40 grams Acacia honey
125 grams caster sugar
150 grams desiccated coconut
30 grams plain flour
2 egg whites
1/2 sachet vanilla sugar

Preheat your oven to 150 °c.

In a small pan over a low heat, melt the sugars and the honey together until they form a smooth paste then take off the heat.

Add the flour and coconut to the sugar and honey and stir until you have a thick mixture. Mix in the two egg whites.

Take a teaspoon and place evenly sized blobs of the mixture on a greased baking sheet.

Bake for 15 minutes until golden.

Serve warm (but not straight from the oven, all that sugar and honey can and will take the roof of your mouth off...I found out the hard way by helping myself to a little stray blob) or cold.