How this blog helped me choose my new profession

This food blog is three and a half years old. I have had a wonderful time working on it, and plan to continue updating it as often as possible.

Still, at times I wondered what my motivation was, why I was I so into it. Though I love baking, I knew there was something more that made me stay up late nights working on it. I sometimes told my husband, "you know, there's something here that's important to me, it's not just about the food." He watched patiently as I squandered hours of my time, trying new complicated recipes, photographing the process and writing it up in detail.

And then in February, I read about a new profession, and had a revelation: I wanted to become a visual explainer. My inspiration came from Common Craft. They make great explanatory videos on all sorts of subjects, financial, technical or political. They use very simple paper cut-out drawings, and simple animation, and this makes the whole message so much more clear and less daunting than the usual marketing blah blah blah.

I figured the world could use a lot more explainers, and decided to try my luck, using my own simple drawings. I made a few sample presentations, set up my web site, and voilà, I am now a freelance visual explainer.

Every minute I spend working on this project is a sheer joy. I look forward to trying new formats and techniques. I plan to work with other kinds of visuals, with professional voice talents, and with professional illustrators. What I really enjoy is building a visual story that explains a concept simply.

So what does this project have to do with La Cerise, other than robbing all my time and energy? It occurred to me that what I particularly enjoy with food blogging is using a combination of photos, text and sometimes videos to teach others what I have learned. And viewers seem to appreciate visual tutorials, as the post on my blog that gets the most hits, the first in a series about croissants, is one in which I quickly threw some photos on Powerpoint slides and wrote some comments alongside each.

Using visuals tools to explain baking techniques is what I enjoy on this blog

My attempts with video were rudimentary to say the least (hello, lighting anyone?), but I loved making them and only wish they were faster to produce.

There is one major difference between La Cerise and Visual Explainer. Where one is long-winded and detailed, the other strives for conciseness. La Cerise addresses people who are interested in baking to begin with. People who aren't will naturally gravitate to other blogs. So here I can go into all sorts of details that only a baking nerd might appreciate.

With Visual Explainer, it's the opposite. My challenge is to make short presentations that capture the attention of even the most jaded, the most bewildered or the most distracted of internet users. No time to read manuals, brochures or white papers? Start with a short visual presentation just to get your bearings. If I've done my job right, you'll understand why you should care, and why you should read more about the subject.

So I hope you'll forgive this off-topic, self-promoting post. The next one will be about food. But if you know of anyone who might need my services, send them to my web site. And I'm always grateful for tips and advice.

Make it easy to understand. Say it with visuals.

To see some examples, visit www.visualexplainer.com

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Meringue d'automne, or the joys and frustrations of being self-taught

(Apologies for my long silence, I've been very busy with a new project, which I'll post about soon. But I still bake!)

One of the things I like about baking and blogging is that I can teach myself a good number of techniques by reading recipes on the web. Blogging about the process gives me an additional incentive to invest the time and effort to get it right. So mostly I'm pleased I've learned quite a bit since starting this blog.

But self-teaching has its limits, and I keep stumbling upon baking mysteries I can't solve even with the help of on-line resources.

A recipe that illustrates the rewards and frustrations I've encountered is my go-to recipe for celebration cakes, Pierre Hermé's meringue d'automne (which he also refers to as a Megève in some of his books).

Since this post got a bit long-winded (I know, I can get obsessive about documenting successes and failures, as with my croissant saga), I decided to summarize what I've learned in the drawing below:



A review of these five versions of the same recipe follows. Process photos and the recipe itself can be found further down in this post.

Version number 1, October 2006:
The shape was lumpy, the glaze was splotchy, the white chocolate lettering was sloppy, but the flavor and texture were delicious.



Version number 2, December 2006:
Ta-da, I found a solution to hide the lumpy shape and avoid the whole glaze issue: inspired by Alice Medrich, I wrapped the cake in chocolate and covered it with ruffles. Details and my video on how to make the chocolate ruffles can be found here.


(Some time in between versions 2 and 3 I made two additional undocumented ruffle-covered cakes, both of which turned out fine).

Version number 3, October 2007:
Here I had more success with the shape of the cake, as I built it within a cake ring lined with plastic, piping the mousse around the edges as I added each layer of meringue. But again I didn't have any success with the glaze, you can see how blotchy it looks.



Version number 4, September 2008:
The chocolate ruffles were decorated with white chocolate squiggles, creating a nice effect. But oh dear, what happened to the meringue? By the time I served the cake, ie two days after assembling it (Hermé recommends preparing it in advance), the meringue had partially vanished into the mousse (sorry no photo of the inside of the cake). The cake still held its shape, as the chilled mousse is quite firm thanks to its butter content, but the texture was not as interesting as there was no longer much contrast between crunchy meringue and unctuous mousse. I assumed the cake should not be prepared too soon before serving, despite what the recipe said.


Version number 5, July 2009:
I tried the glaze one last time, this time with success: the key lies in making a large quantity of glaze, pouring it on top of the cake and letting it settle without touching it with the spatula (though I did touch up the sides). It's a little wasteful but you can put the cake on a rack and catch the surplus on a sheet of parchment paper under the rack.
However, the meringue disappeared again (again no photo), even though I served it the day after making the cake. I don't know why, and it's driving me nuts.




Possible hypotheses for the disappearing meringue

- Is it because I used defrosted egg whites to make the meringues? That's supposed to be a good thing, aged egg whites whip better don't they?
- Or did I not dry the meringues out long enough in the oven? Twice?
- Perhaps I was too generous with the chocolate mousse. I do remember increasing the quantity of mousse, thinking Hermé's recipe was too stingy...

Conclusion

So along with my pride at having mastered the form, the chocolate ruffles, and the shiny glaze of this cake, comes the humbling lesson that the first iteration tasted better than the last. Despite three years' worth of practice, I don't know if the next time I make this cake it will come out right. Argh!


Process photos (click on any to enlarge)

Chocolate ruffles with white chocolate decorations, as on the cover of Bittersweet (see my video for making chocolate ruffles here):



Meringues before baking (the small ones are left-over meringue batter)


The chocolate and butter mixed together


Folding in the whipped egg whites is done with a whisk


The cake is assembled in a ring form lined with plastic (rhodoïde, or acetate I believe it's called)


Once the cake is fully chilled, you can patch up any holes with left-over mousse.


To wrap the cake in chocolate, cover a strip of plastic (rhodoïde or acetate or in this case shelf-liner. Which is thicker and easier to use than rhodoïde, but this particular one left a pattern on the chocolate, even though of course I used the smooth side). Then wrap the strip of plastic with the melted chocolate around the cake, blocking the end with a piece of parchment paper so you can remove the plastic.


Then decorate with the chocolate ruffles





Recipe: Meringue d'automne
Source: Pierre Hermé, Larousse du chocolat

(I increased the proportions of the meringue and of the mousse)

Meringues
- 8 egg whites
- 400g sugar
- 2 vanilla pods or 2 tspn vanilla extract

Mousse
- 400g 70% chocolate
- 417g soft butter
- 5 egg yolks
- 5 tablespoons chocolate sauce (see below)
- 10 egg whites
- 33g sugar

Chocolate sauce
(This makes half a liter of sauce, too much for this recipe)
- 130g 70% chocolate
- 250ml (or grams) water
- 70g sugar
- 125ml (or about the same in grams) thick crème fraiche, or heavy cream

Glaze
(I don't remember but I think I increased this quantity)
- 100g sauce (see above)
- 100g 70% chocolate
- 80ml "crème fraiche liquide" or heavy cream
- 20g soft butter

Meringues
Preheat the oven to 120°C.
Scrape the seeds out of the vanilla bean and reserve. Whip the egg whites at medium speed with an electric beater and very gradually, from the beginning, add half the sugar, then the vanilla seeds. Fold in the rest of the sugar carefully so as not to deflate the meringues.
Pipe (using a number 10 plain tip) the meringues into three spirals of 22 cm diameter on parchment-lined baking sheets.
Put the sheets in the oven, keeping the oven door propped open with a wooden spoon. Bake for 30 minutes at 120°C, then lower the temperature to 100°C and bake for one and a half hour more. Turn the oven off and let the meringues dry out with door propped slightly open for 2 or 3 hours. Cool on a rack.

Chocolate sauce
Chop the chocolate in small pieces. Put it in a saucepan with a thick bottom along with the water, the sugar and the cream. Mix together well with a wooden spoon.
Without ceasing to stir, bring the sauce to boiling point on a medium heat. Lower the heat and let the sauce cook while stirring continuously until the sauce becomes smooth and coats the back of the spoon. Remove from the heat.

Mousse
Chop the chocolate into small pieces and melt it gently. With an electric beater, whip the butter. Incorporate the chocolate in three parts (it should be warm but not hot, about 40°C).
In a bowl mix the egg yolks with the chocolate sauce, and mix this into the butter-chocolate mixture.
Whip the egg whites into soft peaks, adding the sugar little by little. Fold in 1/3 of the egg whites into the chocolate mixture then mix the rest in carefully (use a whisk I would recommend).

Assembling the cake
Place the first meringue disk on a cardboard circle.
(I recommend placing the cardboard within a cake ring lined with plastic wrap, acetate or parchment paper, and piping the mousse around the edges for a nice cylindrical shape. See process photos below.)
Spread a first layer of chocolate mousse, gently press the second meringue disk on top, spread with mousse, add the last meringue disk, then spread top and sides with remaining mousse.
(If you used the method I recommend above you don't need to worry about the sides, though save a little mousse for touching up any holes you may not have filled along the sides of the cake.)
Place in the fridge for two hours.

1) Either wrap the cake in melted chocolate and decorate with ruffles, see process photos below or read my first post on the subject.

2) Or, as per Hermé's original recipe, place cake on a rack over parchment paper and pour glaze over the top, refraining from touching the glaze too much with a spatula. Store the cake in the refrigerator but remove from the fridge one hour before serving.

Glaze
Chop the chocolate.
Bring the cream to a boil in a saucepan with a thick bottom.
Remove the saucepan from the heat. Add a small amount (about 1/4 or 1/5?) of the chocolate and mix it very slowly with a spatula, starting from the center and stirring towards the sides of the saucepan. Continue adding the rest of the chocolate in several small batches and stirring as described above.

(All this caution is important, as otherwise the emulsion can break, which happened to me. If it happens to you, you can use the "mayonnaise method" described by Alice Medrich to save a ganache... If I remember correctly you heat up two TB of cream, then slowly trickle in your seperated ganache as you stir continuously and carefully).

Let the sauce cool to below 60°C.
At this point, add the butter that has been cut into small pieces, stirring as little as possible, then the chocolate sauce, also stirring as little as possible. The mixture should be homogenous.

Use the glaze between 35 and 40°C, pouring it onto the cake. If it has cooled too much, warm it up very gently in a warm-water bath, or in a microwave oven, without stirring.

(This glaze is a nuisance to make, but it tastes good and most important stays shiny even when the cake is stored in the fridge.)

The croquembouche project

A croquembouche is a tower of cream puffs held together with caramel. In France it is the traditional cake for weddings, baptisms or communions.

Looking for an excuse to make a croquembouche
I've had good results with choux pastry in the past, and wanted to try my hand at the biggest of all choux cakes, the croquembouche. I seriously considered making one for my youngest daughter's christening, but thank goodness common sense prevailed and I realized the last minute construction of this monument would conflict with my organization duties.

Then when my friend Risa announced she would be celebrating her 40th birthday, I thought, aha, here's a good reason to make the cake!

The day of the party, I defrosted the 160 choux I had baked earlier, and filled them with three different fillings I had prepared the day before. Then I made the caramel, and started dipping the choux and gluing them together. My husband was out of town, but luckily I had the help of a young girl from our neighborhood to keep my daughters out of the hot caramel.

Too impatient to wait for the caramel to harden...
Construction took place inside a large cone I had made out of paper (details below). I was really pressed for time, as I had to drive 15 minutes north to drop off my 1 1/2 year old with friends, then rush back south to get to the party by 5 pm. The caramel showed signs of thickening and crystallizing, but I kept warming it and crossing my fingers. When I placed the last chou, I just had to see the result, so I turned the tower over onto a plate, removed the cone and voilà!

I was delighted with the result. Of course, I should have waited, as the caramel was probably not quite hard enough. I glued on some candied almonds (dragées) I had left-over from our gingerbread house project. Then I placed the cone back on top of the tower, but decided to transport it right side up, rather than inverted in the cone. Again, a mistake I think.

The cone travelled on the passenger seat next to me where I could grab it every time I took a sharp turn, and after dropping off my daughter I arrived 30 minutes late at the party, in time to make a grand entrance with the cake. The steady rain worried me as I knew caramel does not like humidity.


16:08 Ariane whisks Diane away from the tempting cake.


Pictures at the party


17:48 I was so glad the tower made it in one piece to the party, I didn't notice the ominous crack at the bottom of the tower.


20:26 This was my view from the dinner table. Something seemed odd, I decided to investigate


20:26 Seen from another angle. The leaning croquembouche of Pisa. Help!


20:50 Oh no, please don't tell me there's still a cheese course!


22:08 Ah. I feel better. And the silver lining to the story is once the caramel gets soft, it's a lot easier to serve the cream puffs without wrecking them.


Happy birthday Risa!

And so that's the story of my first croquembouche. I had waited months to make it, then spent several days baking choux, making different flavored fillings, filling the choux, and building the cone, and because I was too impatient to wait five minutes for the caramel to harden, it almost turned into a ruin of cream puffs!

Oh, it tasted quite good. If you like croquembouches. Which, by the way, I've never been crazy about (too much sticky caramel on each puff). But no, really, it was good, especially the chocolate-filled puffs.


Pictures from the past
This project reminded me of croquembouches of my past. In particular, the one at our wedding. I don't quite remember our discussion with the caterer, but I believe I voiced some strong reservations about having a croquembouche (again, too much caramel, and I'm not wild about crème pâtissière). But the caterer convinced us we had to have one if only for the esthetics, and that a host of other desserts would be served alongside. I'm glad she convinced us, as it does make for pretty photos.


The desserts arrived with pomp and glory at our wedding. Click to enlarge, and check out the nougatine columns holding up the top half of the croquembouche! Now that's gutsy. No, I did not make this one!


Did he realize just how many pieces of cake I would be feeding him in the years to come?


Process pictures


Lots of choux in my freezer!


I think I made about 160, though not all were used for my tower.


I found the metal tip awkward for piping, and finally used it just to pierce holes in the choux, using the cheapo plastic tip to pipe in the cream


The cone for building the croquembouche. Stiff paper, taped in the shape of a cone, lined with baking paper. The whole thing is set in a vase so I have two hands free for filling it. I lined the walls of the cone with choux, using caramel as cement (as little caramel as possible). The resulting hollow tower of choux is then tipped over onto plate and the cone and baking paper are removed.
Ahem. WAIT for the caramel to harden before doing this...


Et voilà, you can decorate the cake with candied almonds, marzipan flowers, or anything you like. Some of the choux I had dipped in caramel and then in sugar lumps, which is decorative though tooth-achingly sweet, so I didn't use too many.


Goodbye pretty cake. It was fun, but I won't be making too many of you any time soon!


Recipe for croquembouche, sort of!

I'm feeling a bit lazy about posting a recipe for this cake. Is anyone out there planning to make one? If you are, let me know, I'll post detailed info (update: I've added links to the choux and pastry cream recipes, as well as the recipe for the chocolate pastry cream below). Otherwise, here is the summary: you make fairly small choux (recipe here), bake them a little longer than usual so they are nice and crisp and can hold their shape well, you fill them with pastry cream (recipe here) or diplomat cream -- pastry cream lightened with whipped cream and gelatine (I used three different flavors: chocolate pastry cream (recipe below) and vanilla and praliné diplomat cream) -- and you can chill the filled choux for a few hours in the fridge, but not too long. Then you make loads of caramel, not too dark, using a little glucose or corn syrup to avoid crystallization, and you dip and build within the cone. Don't first coat the choux with caramel, as that will be really sickeningly sweet and sticky. Keep warming the caramel if it gets too thick, though careful, you don't want it to get darker. When the caramel has hardened, tip the whole thing over onto a plate. Do not store in fridge -- as if you have room -- as the caramel will weep. Serve asap!

Recipe: Chocolate Pastry Cream (or crème pâtissière with chocolate)
Source: Pierre Hermé, Secrets Gourmands

Make a double batch of the pastry cream as described here. Before the cream cools off, in three or four additions stir in 200g dark chocolate (70% cocoa) that has been chopped very fine or even grated.

Mixed-starter bread, first attempt: baguette épi

(Update: I've added photos of batch two at the bottom of this post)

I've been hit by a new bread-baking wave these days. Over the last two days I made Smitten Kitchen's light wheat sandwich bread, English muffins, and then felt bold enough to launch into a two-day, mouth-watering recipe from Baking with Julia, which I received over the holidays.

Mixed-starter bread is not a quick bread. You start off with a piece of "old dough," with which you create a first starter that ferments all day. Then you use that to create a second starter, which ferments half a day to overnight, then you make the dough, let it rise, fold it, let it rise again, shape your breads, let them rise, and then bake them with all the steam-creating drama described in my post about pain à l'ancienne.

Fewh! The pain à l'ancienne I was so proud of was a piece of cake compared to this project.

I decided to shape the dough into four wheat-stalk baguettes, or "épis." The result was wonderful. Was it perfect? Before I give you my opinion, have a look at the photos...


The tips may seem quite dark but I assure you it wasn't over-cooked


Oh I wish you could have heard the crust crackle


Pretty even underneath, don't you think?


Now, it would be tempting to stop after these photos, give the recipe, and leave my readers with the impression I didn't encounter any problems...


But for your information/enjoyment, I will share my mishaps with you, ie the other three loaves from the same batch:


Let me introduce Beautiful Epi's ugly siblings: Funny, Snake and Runt. Funny slipped a little as I put it in the oven, Snake (which was supposed to be the easiest one of all, a simple baguette) completely refused to slide into the oven and dragged Runt half-way out with it. I had to remove a section from Runt.

So disaster struck three out of my four breads. And yet, I'm still pleased. Ugly or not, they tasted fabulous: crackling crust, elastic holy crumb with lots of flavor, we wolfed them down in no time. Yes I'll have to learn a trick or two about shaping baguettes (and especially getting them into an oven), but I'm confident that whatever comes out of the oven with this recipe will be quite edible. And possibly entertaining too.


The beauty and one of the beasts. I think Funny has a lot of charm.


I wouldn't know how to recreate this shape if I tried!


Recipe: Mixed Starter Bread
Source: Baking with Julia, by Dorie Greenspan
Recipe originally from Steve Sullivan

[Important: you can view a detailed demonstration of this recipe on the PBS web site (gosh I love their on-line videos). Not only do you get Steve Sullivan's tips and demonstration, but also Julia Child's charming commentary. And given all the information you can get from this video, I'll only provide a summary of the recipe here. You can see photos of the process below the recipe.]

The first-stage, or old-dough starter
- A walnut-sized (1/2 ounce, or 14g) piece of fully risen dough (pizza, or other white flour bread dough.) [I used English muffin dough]
- 1/4 cup (60g) warm water (105°F to 115°F, or 40-46°C)
- 2/3 cup (85-93g*) unbleached all-purpose flour

Cut the dough into small bits, soak in the water five minutes to soften. Mix in the flour, first with a spoon then knead. You're not trying to develop gluten, just incorporate all the ingredients.

Put the dough in a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and allow the dough to rise in a warm place (between 80°F and 85°F or 27-29°C).

[I heated a glass of water in the microwave then placed the bowl with the glass of hot water in the microwave and closed the door. Periodically I took the dough out and reheated the water, to make sure the environment stayed warm.]

After 8 hours the starter dough should be bubbly, soft and sticky, and springy.

The second-stage starter
- The first-stage starter (above)
- 1/4 cup (60g) warm water (same temps as above)
- 3/4 cup (94-105g*) unbleached all purpose flour

Make this second sponge like the first. Rise for 4 hours in a warm environment (same temp as above). It should more than double.

After the rise, the sponge, when stretched, will show long, lacy strands of gluten and smell sweet and yeasty, even though no yeast has been added. Chill the risen sponge for at least 1 hour, but no more than 8 hours, before proceeding.

[Update: for batch 2 I forgot to put the sponge in the fridge overnight so it got very yeasty and alcoholy with the excess fermentation. However the bread still developed nicely, and tasted wonderful, if a little sour.]

The final dough
- 1 1/4 cups (296g) cool water (about 78°F or 25°C)
- 1/2 tspn SAF instant yeast (not rapid rise) or 3/4 tspn active dry yeast
- The second-stage starter (above)
- 3 1/3 cups (416-466g*) unbleached all purpose flour
- 1 TB (12-13g) kosher salt
[I don't know much about kosher salt. I used regular, and rather than measuring a TB I tried to use the 2% of flour weight rule, which was less than one TB, but somehow the bread could have used a little more salt. Maybe I made a math mistake.]

You are advised to use a stand mixer here. Put the water into the bowl of the mixer [hold back a little water to add at the same time as the salt later] sprinkle the yeast, and stir by hand to mix. Deflate the second stage starter, break it into pieces, add it to the bowl and allow it to soften for 5 min. Add the flour, pulse the machine on and off so the flour doesn't fly out, mix on low speed until flour is incorporated then let the dough rest for 10 minutes to give the flour time to absorb the water.

With the machine running at low speed, add the left-over water and sprinkle the salt onto the dough. Increase speed to medium high and mix and knead the dough for 5 to 8 minutes. The dough will be very soft and moist and may ride up the hook. Push the dough down periodically.

Transfer the dough to a clean bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and allow to rest in a warm place (between 80°F and 85°F or 27-29°C) for about 1 1/2 hours. The dough will probably double in bulk and it should have a network of bubbles visible under the surface.

[This somehow never worked with my schedule. So I let the dough rise more slowly, at a room temperature of about 19°C. Worked well too.]

Final [well almost final, there's still the rise after shaping!] rise. Fold the dough down on itself a few times, without punching down, in order to redistribute the yeast, then cover again and let rise for 45 minutes.

"After this last rise, you must shape and bake the dough. If you refrigerate the dough now, or do anything else to retard it, you will have a sourdough bread, which is not what this dough is meant to be."

[Update: Yeah well, as mentioned above, with batch 2 I made a mistake with starter two and definitely got some sour notes in my bread. But it still tasted wonderful. So you can't follow the recommendations exactly, don't worry too much.]

Shaping: I am too tired to type up the instructions for shaping. Look at the video. Also I am sure there are many resources on the web for shaping baguettes, couronnes, épis or pain fendu (which is what Sullivan demonstrates in the video above). Finally this site has good tips for shaping an épi.

Baking: If you have divided the dough into four baguettes (or mutant baguettes) as I did, preheat and prepare the oven as described here and bake for 20 minutes. It's not the exact instructions from the recipe but close enough, and the ones I used. If you have any doubt, consult the video!

Process photos:


This is the first starter, before the 8-hour fermentation


After 8 hours in a warm environment


The starter has been chopped into pieces and left to soak for 5 minutes. Funny looking isn't it?


Starter number 2


Starter number 2 after its rise


The freshly kneaded dough.


The dough has risen!


Look at the web of gluten!


Trying to flatten the dough for shaping made all these big bubbles appear


Look at that bubble! This sort of thing makes me laugh as I bake...


I thought these baguette shapes looked pretty good nestled in their floured dish towel...


Ah ha. Now I see it. For one thing they were too long for my oven.


Oh my. This is where the trouble begins. How do you get the loaves off the insufficiently floured towel? You what, flip them onto the peel? Ha.


These still look semi-OK, though a little dry and limp (maybe they rose for too long?)


Here it started getting ugly. When dough this wet sticks together or to the towel, good luck sliding it onto anything...


Eek, what an ugly baguette. And this was before it fell out of the oven onto the oven door (that's how it became Snake, and its peel-mate, Runt). At least the spill drew the attention away from my pathetic attemps at scoring the dough. I had a razor blade, I held it like the book said, what did I do wrong?



I had to finish with something prettier... Though I didn't get good photos of the insides, trust me, the crumb of this bread is lovely.

Well, I have another second-stage starter in the fridge as I type, tomorrow is a new bread-baking day for me!

Update the next day: Oops, I was so busy typing up this post I didn't realize the starter was not in the fridge. So it spent a nice warm night out in my microwave oven. But the bread I made with it was still delicious, if a little sour.

I also had better luck shaping a wreath, method described here. Sorry about the bad lighting of the photos, it was dark by the time I got my breads out of the oven.




In need of yeast-based inspiration? Head on over to Wild Yeast's regular YeastSpotting roundups.

Gingerbread

When Christmas comes around, I love to bake American and German-style cookies. I can't think of similarly festive baked goods in France. Confections such as truffles and marrons glacés, yes, cakes such as a "bûche de Noël" (yule log), but no cookies. At least not that I can think of. Furthermore, what I find missing in French Christmas traditions is spices. While I'm not an unconditional fan of cinnamon or ginger year-round, I find no other flavor is as evocative of Christmas.

Above is a box of goodies I put together as a gift. It contains gingerbread, pinwheel cookies, brown sugar cut-out cookies, and "pecanios" or pecan tartlets. (The box was photographed in the snow on our balcony.)

I love to bake and decorate gingerbread. The house smells good of baking and spices. Gingerbread dough is sturdy and the cookies can be formed in intricate patterns for decorations.

This year the girls and I made a large gingerbread house as well as several smaller ones for their immediate consumption, and also some cookies for decorating Christmas trees.



For the large house I used a set of special cookie cutters for the roof, walls and chimney. For the smaller houses, I had a single smaller cookie cutter for the front of the house, and improvised some rectangles for the roof and low walls.


A gingerbread village!


The weather contributed to the seasonal cheer.


I wanted to photograph the cookies with a snow scene in the background but found it difficult to focus on both simultaneously


The box nearly toppled out the window...


A white plate is a good background


A box full of gingerbread, waiting to be decorated. Notice the house cut-out which I used to make the small gingerbread houses


My husband calls this my signature bear


So hard not to touch the houses as they dry!


Recipe: Gingerbread
For making gingerbread houses or cookies
Source: Joy of Cooking (1997)
[I haven't changed the recipe any, but the following is only a an excerpt of the detailed instructions for making a gingerbread house. This makes a lot of dough!]

Whisk together thoroughly:
- 6 cups all purpose flour
- 1/2 tspn baking powder
- 4 tspn ground ginger
- 4 tspn ground cinnamon
- 1/2 tspn ground cloves or allspice
- 1/2 tspn salt

Beat on medium speed until fluffy and well blended:
- 12 tablespoons (170g) butter, softened
- 1 1/2 cups packed light brown sugar

Beat in until well combined:
- 2 large eggs
- 1 cup dark molasses
[I find the taste too strong, perhaps European molasses are stronger? So I use half honey, half molasses]
- 1 TB water
[Careful, dough can get very sticky. I once forgot the water and it worked better, though the dough was a little harder to roll]

Beat half of the flour mixutre into the molasses mixutre until well blended and smooth. Stir in the remaining flour, then knead the mixture until well blended. If the dough is soft, stir in more flour until it is firmer and more manageable but not at all dry.
Place the dough in a sealable plastic bag or airtight plastic container. Set aside in a cool place, but not the refrigerator, for at least 2 hours or up to 6 hours. Or refrigerate the dough for up to 3 days; bring to room temperature before using.

[I roll the dough without waiting between two sheets of parchment paper, then thoroughly chill the dough in the fridge or even freezer before cutting it out]

Divide dough in half (I rolled about 600g of dough at a time, if memory serves). Roll the dough directly on parchment paper so that there is no warping when transferring dough to the baking sheet. Roll it to a scant 1/4 of an inch.

[The dough is sticky. I roll it between two sheets of parchment paper, then freeze the whole thing before making my cut-outs. Otherwise it's hard to peel off the parchment paper. For more tips on this rolling technique see an explanation here; and some videos I made here.]

Bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 11 to 15 minutes for large pieces, 6 to 8 for small pieces. Or until the edges are tinged with brown.
[I like mine quite dark and crunchy.]


These molasses are very dark, but I use only half the amount and complete the rest with honey, making a lighter but very flavorful dough.





Roll and cut the shapes directly on the final parchment paper, then peel off the dough that's in between the cut-outs so that you never move them. This helps the cut-outs keep their shape, which is important if you're building a house.

Saint Honoré

Here is the second part of my recent baking spree, the Saint Honoré (the first part was the Paris-Brest).

Creamy cakes are not usually my favorite, but I make an exception for a good Saint Honoré. The varieties of textures make it special: crispy puff pastry, tender choux, crunchy caramel, velvety crème Chiboust, and fluffy whipped cream.

Crème Chiboust vs. millefeuille cream
The crème Chiboust -- pastry cream lightened with Italian meringue and a touch of gelatin -- is traditional. But the St Honoré can also be filled with what is known as a millefeuille cream, which is pastry cream "lightened" with whipped cream. This is what Pierre Hermé recommends.

Since the first of these two creams seemed lighter (!) than the second, and also more traditional, I chose to deviate from Hermé's recipe and make the Chiboust cream.

However I wilfully disregarded the advice found in all recipes, namely that Chiboust cream must be made at the last minute before filling the cake. I made mine the night before, and stored it in a pastry bag. I don't think this advance preparation was good for the cream's texture, but I couldn't make everything at the last minute, and wanted to assemble the cake on site, to make sure nothing got soggy.

Result: some flaws, but a tasty and striking-looking cake
Though the cream's texture was perhaps not optimal, and the whipped cream became too soft, I would say the final result was very good, and encourages me to try again... some time!

Some process photos


Crème pâtissière (pastry cream)


Italian meringue folded into the pastry cream


I like to use a wide jug to hold the pastry bag while my two hands are free to fill it. Make sure to fold the top of the bag over the top of the jug.


The circle of puff pastry.



Pipe choux pastry around the puff pastry disk, about 1cm from the edge, and then make a thin, slightly squashed down spiral in the center of the cake.


The spiral in the center gives the cake structure and lightness; it will support the cream that will be piped in later.


The choux are smaller than usual, piped to about 2cm wide


Fill them with cream and scrape off any cream that sticks out. (This part I did a couple hours ahead of time, and the choux pastry didn't get too soggy).


The tops of the small choux are dipped in the caramel, and left to harden, caramel-side down on a silpat or parchment liner.



The outside choux pastry ring gets filled with cream at regular intervals.


The bottoms of the choux are then dipped in caramel and attached to the base, touching each other and forming walls for the cream filling to be piped in later.



I practiced at home how to use my Saint Honoré piping tip, results shown with arrows. I found out the slit has to be on top, but there is nothing difficult about piping with this tip. At this stage my whipped cream still seemed firm enough to hold its shape.
However I was concerned about the cake getting soggy if I filled it too early, so I assembled the rest of the cake on site. I transported the Chiboust and whipped creams in their piping bags to our friends' house, refrigerated them there, and filled the cake just before serving.


After filling the cake with what little Chiboust I had left, and piping the whipped cream on top, I had about 2.5 seconds to snap some shots before the cake got whisked to the dinner table.
The whipped cream looks too soft. It doesn't have the crisp criss-cross pattern I was hoping for. The cream may not have liked being transported in a piping bag to our friends' house, or else there is a skill to making a good stiff whipped cream that I don't know about.


The cake looks best when modelled by Jess and Vicky!

Yikes, a pastry school test for bakers?
The day before I started baking, I realized I may have gotten myself in too deep when I read on Tartelette that the Saint-Honoré cake is used for testing bakers' skills:

"It is the “must pass” element of pastry school students and it is a cake that includes several elements and techniques that bakers should try at least once: puff pastry, cream puff dough, caramel and pastry filling."

While I feel pretty happy about my St Honoré hardware skills (puff pastry, pâte à choux, and using caramel as cement), I would never pass the software part of the test: crème Chiboust, crème Chantilly. Add to that my recent difficulties with buttercream, not to mention that my ganache often separates, and I see I still have a lot to learn about all things creamy!

Other sources of inspiration
Finally, you can find many other delicious-looking St Honorés by running a search on "Daring Bakers St Honoré."


Recipe: Gateau Saint-Honoré
From Pierre Hermé, Secrets Gourmands (loosely translated)

For 6 people

- 300g choux pastry [this quantity may not be sufficient I found]
- 150g puff pastry
- 350g mille-feuille cream [I used chiboust cream, see both recipes below. Again, make more than this quantity, I didn't feel I had quite enough.]
- 250g sugar
- 60g glucose
[I think this prevents crystallization, and perhaps makes the caramel less hard. If you don't have glucose, you can try corn syrup, I think the result should be similar but can't vouch for it.]
- 80g water
- 250g whipped cream (crème chantilly, or cream whipped stiff with a small amount of sugar)

Roll the puff pastry to 2mm thick. Cut out a 22cm circle. Place it on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper that has been moistened with water. [Prick with a fork and chill while you prepare the choux pastry.]

Preheat oven to 180°C.

Place the choux pastry in a piping bag with a French size 9 or 10 tip [about 12mm in diameter]. Form a crown about 1cm from the edge of the circle. Then pipe a loose spiral inside the crown, which will serve to support the cream that will be piped in later. The spiral should be piped thinner than the crown, so press down on your piping bag. Dust the puff pastry with sugar.

On a second baking sheet lined with parchment paper, using the rest of the choux dough make 24 small choux, each about 2cm wide [these are significantly smaller than a typical choux or chouquette or profiterole]. Place both baking sheets in the oven.

You'll be baking the cake base about 25 minutes, and the choux about 18 minutes. After about 6 minutes, open the door of the oven a crack and block it with a wooden spoon, so the steam can escape. Using a small piping tip (French size 5), make small holes every two centimeters in the crown, and into the bottom of each chou. Let the base and the choux cool completely.

Place the millefeuille cream in a pastry bag with a French size 7 tip. Poke the tip into the holes you have made in the crown and squeeze in the cream by pressing hard. Proceed the same way for the choux. Wipe off any excess cream.

In a saucepan, mix the glucose, the sugar and the water. Cook until 155°C [if I remember correctly, this seemed barely golden to me, I cooked the caramel longer to have a darker amber.] Place the bottom of the saucepan in cold water to stop the caramel from getting any darker. Dip the tops of the choux into the caramel and place them, top down, on parchment paper or on a Silpat liner. The dip the other side (bottom) of the choux in caramel and immediately attach them to the ring of pastry. You want to try to get some caramel on the sides of each chou so they stick to each other as you place them contiguously on the crown. Let them cool off.

Fill the center of the cake with the remaining mille-feuille cream, then pipe the whipped cream in a zigzag using either a St Honoré tip or a large star tip. Serve the St Honoré as soon as possible.


Recipe: Mille-feuille cream
From Pierre Hermé, Secrets Gourmands (loosely translated)
[This is the cream Hermé uses in a St Honoré]

- 750g pastry cream
- 1.5 dl [about 150g] very cold whipping cream
- 2 Tablespoons sugar

Chill a large bowl in the freezer for 15 minutes. Whip the cream in the chilled bowl until it is firm. Add the sugar. Fold this whipped cream into the pastry cream.

Recipe: Chiboust cream
[OK to be honest I don't remember which recipe I used for Chiboust cream, as I looked at so many! But the following seems very good.]
Source: Tartelette

Saint Honore Cream (Rapid Chiboust or Diplomat Cream)

1 envelope unflavored gelatin (7 gr.)
1/4 cup cold water (60 ml)
1/2 cup + 2 Tablespoons sugar (130 gr)
½ cup all-purpose flour (70 gr)
1/4 teaspoon salt
5 egg yolks
2 cups whole milk (500ml)
1 Tb. rum [I left out the rhum]
¼ cup whipping cream (57 gr)
3 egg whitesdash of salt
1/2 cup sugar (105 gr)

Soak the gelatin in the 1/4 cup of cold water.
Put the sugar, flour, and salt into a saucepan and stir together with a whisk. Add the yolks and enough milk to make a paste. Whisk in the remainder of the milk. Place over low heat and stirring constantly, cook until thick. Remove from heat and stir in the rum and the gelatin. Stir until the gelatin is completely dissolved.Stir in the whipping cream. Set the mixing bowl in cold water and stir until the cream is cool. Place the egg whites in a clean bowl and using clean beaters, whip them with the dash of salt. As soon as the whites begin to stiffen, gradually add the 1/2 cup of sugar and beat until they are very stiff. Fold the egg whites into the cooled cream.

Paris-Brest

I went a little nuts last weekend. Friends invited us for dinner, and I offered to bring dessert. I wanted to try something I've never made before, despite the risk of failure. I hesitated between two classic French cakes: Saint-Honoré? Paris-Brest? As the number of expected guests climbed from from 8 to 11, the (self-imposed) pressure increased, but also the challenge. Let's make both! ("Uh, will I see you this weekend?" said a dismayed husband.)

I'll break this marathon baking session into two posts, starting with the Paris-Brest. (Unfortunately most photos were taken at night-time and in a rush.)

The Paris-Brest name comes from a bicycle race, hence the wheel shape. This is a lovely dessert. Really not difficult to make... if you know how to make a buttercream. I don't.

The elements
A big fat ring of choux pastry is sprinkled with nuts and sugar before baking. A thinner "inner tube" ring of pastry is baked separately. A cream is made, usually either pure buttercream, or crème mousseline (pastry cream with butter added), or buttercream mixed with pastry cream (this last one is what I attempted). The traditional flavoring is prâlinée, or caramelized nuts. The big choux "doughnut" is cut in half, a thin layer of cream is piped in, the "inner tube" is placed on top -- to provide volume and lightness -- and cream is piped decoratively over it, before the top half of the doughnut is placed back on top, sprinkled with confectioner's sugar.

Three tips for choux pastry success
At this stage I feel confident about my choux pastry skills. The Hermé recipe I've posted about before works all the time for me, and I use it frequently to make chouquettes on short notice.

A few tips for those who are nervous about choux pastry:
1 - Before adding the eggs, you really have to dry out the flour-water-milk-butter mixture well, by cooking it for 3 minutes, stirring it all the time. Don't heed the advice of recipes that say you are done when the dough pulls away from the sides of the pot, or when there is a film of dough stuck to the bottom of the pot. Just look at your watch, 2 1/2 to 3 minutes of arduous stirring over a medium-high flame, no less.
2 - Hold back some of the egg if you are using very large eggs. Check the texture of the dough, if it's forming a nice shiny ribbon when you lift it up you don't need to add any more egg.
3 - Contrary to many recipes' advice, you can make this dough the day before. Just store it in the fridge in the bag you will use for piping, making sure it is well sealed.

My baking nemesis: buttercream
For some reason, I fail every time. If it looks OK on the photos it's because it was still very chilled. Five minutes later it was turning liquid faster than we could eat the cake. Ugh it's so maddening, I've read every tip on the subject. (My rant against buttercream got too long, I've moved it to the bottom of this post).

Some process photos and comments
(I have no photos of the buttercream process, I was too stressed.)


Three layers of piped choux pastry (two on the bottom, one on top), sprinkled with nuts and granulated sugar.


I didn't expect it to inflate so much!


The fully baked choux ring, removed from the metal cake ring.


I piped the "inner tube" with a smaller piping tip, using the tart ring as a guideline for piping a circle. I should have made it slightly smaller.


The baked "inner tube"


Cut the choux "doughnut" in half.


Place the "inner tube" on top of a thin layer of cream.


Cover with cream, piping it like a braid (I wasn't sure how to do that) over the tube so that some cream will stick out once you close the cake sandwich. I should have used a larger star tip (this is a size 7 in France, a size 12 would have been better). Sprinkle the top half with confectioners sugar.


Quick, serve it before the cream slides away! Unless of course you know how to make a firm cream. If so, I'd love some tips.

The next day we had guests over for tea. With the left-over cream and pâte à choux I whipped up another Paris-Brest in less than an hour. This one is smaller, it served four. There's nothing significantly different between this one and the previous one, but I got a few daylight photos so I'm including them here.


This is a crown made with a smaller piping tip, and no metal cake ring to support it.


This time I made the "inner tube" a little too small, so I cut it in four pieces to center it onto the larger ring (no photo). The piping is not particularly elegant. Since my guests had arrived and the cream was very soft, I piped the cream in a mad rush. But the Paris-Brest is apparently quite forgiving.

Recipe: Paris-Brest cake
Source: Pierre Hermé, Secrets Gourmands
Serves 6 to 8
(I increased the proportions to make mine larger)

For the cake
- 300g pâte à choux (The recipe I use makes 750g; I would recommend making the whole amount, if not more, and piping left-overs into little choux.)
- 50g granulated sugar (I'm not sure if granulated is the term: each grain is quite large...)
- 50g chopped blanched almonds
- 15g soft butter
- confectioner's sugar

For the cream
- 300g buttercream (see recipe below)
- 90g praline paste (see recipe below)
- 225g pastry cream

On a baking sheet lined with baking paper, place a 22cm buttered baking circle.
Pipe the choux pastry using a large star tip (I used a smooth tip, French size 13). Pipe one circle inside the baking circle, another contiguous one inside that, then a third circle on top of the first two. Sprinkle with granulated sugar and nuts.

On another baking sheet, form a fourth, slightly thinner circle, with a slightly smaller radius than the largest of the three circles piped previously (what I call the "inner tube").

Bake both in a 180°C preheated oven, for 40 to 45 minutes for the large one, less for the small "inner tube." (or until both are a nice medium brown, not too pale).

After 15 minutes of baking, crack the oven door open using a wooden spoon to let the steam escape. When the cakes are baked, let them cool on a rack.

Prepare the cream: whip the buttercream to lighten it, then add the praline paste, and the pastry cream, mixing with a whisk.

When the cakes are cool, cut the larger ring in half, horizontally, using a serrated knife. Pipe a thin layer of cream (using a star piping tip, larger than the size 7 I used). Place the "inner tube" on top and pipe more cream over it in a braid, so that a little will stick out the sides of the cake.

Dust the top of the cake with confectioners sugar, then place it on top of the cream.

Hermé says the Paris-Brest can be served right away or refrigerated, but must be brought out 1 hour before serving. (I suppose that's if your cream is successful...)

I wasn't sure if the cake might become soggy so I brought the cream in a piping bag and piped it into the cake at the house where the dinner was held.

Recipe: Crème au beurre (Buttercream)
Source: Pierre Hermé, Secrets Gourmands

Ingredients for 750g cream
- 200g sugar
- 75g water
- 3 eggs
- 3 egg yolks
- 250g very soft butter

Pour the water into a small saucepan. Add the sugar. As soon as it boils, wash the walls of the pot with a wet brush. Cook the syrup until 120°C.

In the meantime, whip the eggs and egg yolks until they turn white.
Cream the butter in another bowl so that it becomes creamy in consistency.

When the syrup is ready, drizzle it slowly into the eggs while whipping at low speed. Continue whipping until the mixture is cold, then incorporate the butter while whipping continuously. When the cream is homogenous and smooth, place it in the fridge until you need it. You can keep it for 3 or 4 days at 4°C.

Flavorings
You can flavor this cream with kirsch, Cointreau, Grand Marnier, rhum, or cognac by adding, once the cream is finished, 1.5 tablespoons of these alcohols. For coffee flavoring, add 2 tsp instant coffee diluted in 2 tspn water, plus 1 tspn coffee extract. For pistachio, add 1 tbspn pistachio paste. You can add pastry cream, in varying proportions depending on the application.


Recipe: Praline paste

(This batch will be more than you will need for the Paris-Brest, but can be used later. Or make a smaller amount).

Ingredients
- 300g sugar
- 100g water
- To avoid crystallization: a few drops of lemon, or a small part of the sugar amount replaced with glucose or corn syrup (I used neither and my sugar crystallized. Not pretty, but I managed to get some caramel out of it).
- 300g toasted almonds or hazelnuts, or a combination thereof.

If the hazelnuts still have their skin, as soon as the come out of the oven wrap them in a towel. Let them sit there for a few minutes, then rub them hard together inside the towel to loosen their skins. It doesn't matter if you don't get it all off.

Make a caramel with the sugar, water and lemon/glucose/corn syrup. Once it reaches a nice amber color (180°C?) remove from heat, add the warm nuts and stir.

Spread as thin as possible on a baking pan with a silpat lining and leave it to harden.


Caramelized nuts ready to be ground into pralinée paste.

Once it's cool, break into pieces and grind in several batches in a food processor. The praline will quickly break down into powder (I think this powder is called pralin, and can also be used for flavoring or sprinkling on top of dessert). It will take several minutes for the powder to turn into paste, just keep scraping the sides down and processing some more. This was tedious in my tiny processor... The paste keeps a long time in the refrigerator.


The nuts quickly turn to powder. Keep scraping and pushing the powder down and eventually it will turn...


... to paste. It will never be as smooth as the paste you can buy, but I like the slight crunch of my home-made pralinée paste.


Appendix: My troubles with buttercream

So, if you have nothing better to do, pull up a chair and listen to me whine about buttercream.

It doesn't help that the tips I read all contradict each other. "Use very soft butter!" "The butter should be soft, but not too soft!" "The egg and syrup mixture should be absolutely cold" "Uhm, not too cold!" "If the cream has a curdled appearance, warm the bowl slightly." "Chill the cream if it separates." "Add more butter." "Use the whisk beater." "Use the paddle beater!"

And the most frequent advice: "If the cream looks curdled, don't worry, just keep beating, it will come together after a while." Maybe I should have tried even longer, but I was afraid my Kitchenaid would start smoking.

The worst is there always seems a point when the buttercream looks OK, well emulsified and shiny. Then it separates again, or becomes grainy or runny. I hate it!

And it's not the sugar syrup that's a problem. I boil it up, check the temperature, pour it onto the eggs as I whip and the eggs turn into a beautiful, poofy mass. The problem is when I add the butter.

This time I thought I would try adding the soft butter when the eggs were still a hint warm, about 30°C. Too warm, it turned to soup.

Fine, I knew what to do: I kept back some of the butter, chilled everything for 15 minutes, then used the "mayonnaise" method: I whipped the remaining butter and slowly trickled the runny buttercream into it. It took a few trips to the fridge but at one point I felt I had it, the cream was thick and shiny. Aha, success!

But no. I added the pralinée paste, then whipped in the pastry cream (too little pastry cream, I forgot I had to halve the buttercream recipe). And it all turned to soup. I froze the cream in the pastry bag for a few hours, then placed it in the fridge for two hours, and was able to pipe something that looked decent for a few minutes. Sigh.

Maybe it's the addition of pralinee paste and chilled pastry cream that's the culprit. But when I make buttercream for coffee macarons I have the same problem when I add the coffee flavoring. What looked smooth for an instant turns back to separated or granular-looking cream.

Sorry for being so long-winded about these difficulties. But if anyone knows THE definitive tip that might help me, I would very be grateful.

Chocolate princess on a birthday cake

I spent a good part of my childhood drawing princesses. Their fancy dresses ballooned out from their waists to reach each side of the page. I loved watching movies with "beautiful dresses." Come Christmas I was in heaven when French TV channels would broadcast episodes of Sissi, portraying a famous Austro-Hungarian empress. Gone with the Wind was also a favorite of mine.

I thought adolescence had laid this fascination with period costumes to rest. But then I had three daughters, and discovered the fantasy lives on. "Can you draw me a princess?" Oh OK, twist my arm.

However when birthdays came I felt a little guilty. I did not want to bake a dome-shaped cake covered in pink fondant and stick half a Barbie doll on top. Princesses are nice, but good food is better. So all my daughters received were dark-chocolate cakes with a few Smarties scattered on them as a token acknowledgement of their target audience.



Then I chanced upon a discussion thread (in French) about using the technique for "Windowcolor" with chocolate. I did not know what Windowcolor was, and in the process discovered a fun activity for the kids, who have now decorated our windows with colorful butterflies, hearts and flowers.



What I like about this method applied to food is that the decoration is entirely made of chocolate. OK, white chocolate is not really chocolate. But I'm sure the high quality kind is a lot tastier than the fondant or royal icing usually associated with cake decorating.

All you have to do is trace a drawing, or draw it freehand, with melted chocolate on a transparent plastic sheet, chill it, then fill in the spaces with another color chocolate, chill again, and then peel off the plastic and carefully place the decoration on a cake. More instructions are below.

And if flounces and petticoats are not your style, you can use any type of illustration as a model. Come to think of it, two years ago I used this technique for a World Cup-inspired chocolate tart. ("Allez les Bleus" means "Go France." Sadly the chocolate exhortation had no effect.)


Simple and unadorned is the most elegant.


Ah but it's such fun to make swishes and curlicues... And colorful Smarties are a birthday tradition in this house.


I love her look of surprise.


^
For my second daughter, princess and cake were decorated with rococo excess. Too much, said my husband, but I couldn't stop myself.




My second daughter had asked for a princess too, so there was less of a surprise effect. But she seems happy! If you squint really hard, you might see some "Windowcolor" decorations on the windows in the background. Sorry for the small photos, I just feel a little strange about publishing shots of the kids. I compromise by making small images. Which are convenient for hiding the sloppy frosting at the back of the cake. I ran out of glaze, and was in a hurry...


This is how you do it:

1. Find or make a drawing you want to use as a model. Dora, Spiderman, Winnie the Pooh can all be used instead of a princess. Make sure the drawing is not too intricate as the chocolate lines are thick compared to a pencil line.

2. Place the drawing under clear plastic -- I used "rhodoïd" sheets but a sheet protector is probably even better as the drawing you are tracing can be trapped inside.

3. Melt some good quality chocolate gently (so it doesn't get lumpy) and pour it either into a squirt bottle, as shown in an earlier photo in this post, or in a paper cone, as shown here. Instructions for making cones can be found in this video.

4. Carefully trace the outlines of the drawing.


For the contours and the details I used dark chocolate.

5. Place chocolate with drawing onto a baking sheet or tray and into the freezer for a few minutes.

6. Using another color chocolate, decorate or fill in spaces within the chocolate contour. Careful: make sure the chocolate for the second color is not too hot or it will melt the chocolate contour. I usually leave the chilled tray under the drawing.

7. Freeze again for a few minutes

8. Continue with another color if you wish. Near the edges of the drawing you want to be precise, so the filling doesn't bleed over the contours. But if it does, you can always scrape mistakes away with a sharp knife once the chocolate has hardened. For the center or large areas, I ended up using the back of a spoon, as it got too tedious using a cone or the squeeze bottle. Don't hesitate to make a slightly thick layer of white chocolate on top of the other color decorations as it will make the whole figure more sturdy.


After filling in the hair and flowers with milk chocolate, I covered the rest in white chocolate, carefully filling in the edges first.


I finished spreading the white chocolate with the back of a spoon. It looks very messy but once turned over it will be smooth.

9. Once the decoration has hardened, peel off the plastic and place the decoration upside down on a chilled cake. If the cake is frosted, you can embed the decoration in the soft frosting. Or you can place it loose on top of the cake, so that you can remove it before cutting slices.


Princess number 3 went to school with my second daughter. Since the teacher asked parents to avoid cakes with messy frosting, I simply baked some brownies with Smarties embedded in them as a frame, then once they were cool I added the princess on top. I did use a dab of left-over frosting to glue her in place for easier transportation. The heart has my daughter's name in it, backward. I had forgotten there's a mirror effect when you flip the chocolate over.


Notes

- If you include writing, write it backwards, as the decoration will be turned upside down.

- You can color the white chocolate with food coloring. I think some people had issues with liquid food coloring as it tended to make the chocolate seize, the way a drop of water will. It's still possible though. And I think powdered colors are probably a safe bet. But I don't know for certain, as I don't usually use food coloring.

- Make sure you use good quality chocolate. It tastes better, melts better, and hardens better.

- Careful: this chocolate is not tempered. That means it will not stay bright and crisp at room temperature. Keep it refrigerated. I think you can leave it out on the chilled cake for a few hours (ours stayed out 2 or 3 hours), but to be on the safe side, temper the chocolate if you need to leave it out for long.

- There is sometimes a problem with warping. To keep it flat, once the decoration is almost completely chilled through, I place another sheet of plastic on top of the decoration, then a book on top, and freeze the whole thing.

- Of course, you can make this decoration several days ahead, just make sure you have room in your freezer (or maybe fridge) and that nothing risks breaking the decoration.

- This may seem obvious, but mistakes can happen: make sure the cake is completely cool before placing the easy-to-melt decoration on top...

- The decoration is fragile. Handle very gently when you place it on the cake!

Charlotte and Biscuits à la Cuillère (Ladyfingers)

As summer comes to a brutal end here in Switzerland, I want to post this to say farewell to lovely berries. I particularly enjoyed them this year, especially the rasperries. (If I have the time I'll post about another berry recipe I made using red currants. It was a partial failure, but still encouraging).

I've never made a charlotte before, though these are fairly common desserts in France. While on vacation there in July, I bought a charlotte mold on a whim, and making one became a priority project for some unfathomable reason. The fact the mold had to be abandoned somewhere near Geneva in our broken down car (we had a rather difficult trip home from vacation, but all is well now) did not deter me. I went ahead and made a charlotte in a simple ring mold. Oh and of course I had to make my own ladyfingers.

For the charlotte mousse I combined two recipes. I used Nick Malgieri's idea of using ricotta (half the calories of cream), but preferred Hermé's use of fresh raspberry juice. Malgieri likes to concentrate fruit juices by boiling them down a little. Perhaps it works, but in his recipe Hermé warns agains heating the raspberry juice as it might give a jam-like flavor to the final product.

The final result was delicious, light yet very satisfying. I would gladly make it again, even though it contains gelatin.





Recipe: Biscuits à la cuillère



Source: Pierre Hermé, Le Larousse du Chocolat

Ingredients
- 55g flour (type 45, ie not strong flour)
- 6 egg yolks
- 85g sugar
- 3 egg whites


- Preheat oven to 220°C*.
- Sift flour. Whip egg yolks with 50g sugar until the mixture turns whitish.
- Whip the egg whites until stiff, adding the remaining 35g of sugar gradually.
- Gently fold the egg yolk mixture into the egg white mixture.
- Sprinkle on the flour and fold it in very carefully too, so as not to deflate the mixture.
- Line a baking sheet with baking paper. Pipe fingers between 4cm and 10cm long and 1.5cm wide using a plain tip (#7 in France, about 1 cm wide?).
- Bake for 15 minutes*.

*Either the temperature is too high, or the baking time is too long, but my ladyfingers turned a little too dark and I pulled them out before they were done.

- Hermé doesn't mention this but Malgieri does: dust the fingers with sifted confectionners' sugar before baking them.

Lining the mold: if you are using a ring mold, you can pipe a spiral into the shape of a circle to cover the bottom of your mold. After baking, fit it into the mold, and trim it so that the fingers can be wedged between the ladyfinger circle and the sides of the pan. Trim each finger so that it is flush with the next as you stand them up around the sides of the pan.






Recipe: Raspberry Charlotte



Sources: this recipe is a combination of Nick Malgieri's Low-calorie raspberry charlotte (Perfect Pastry) and Pierre Hermé's Charlotte aux fruits rouges (Secrets Gourmands)

Ingredients
- One charlotte mold or 20 cm spring-form pan lined with lady fingers
- 335g rasperries (frozen and thawed)
- 90g sugar or less
- 7-9g gelatin sheets (I used 7)
- 1/2 TB lemon juice
- 90g egg whites (about 3)
- 252g ricotta or 187g heavy cream (I used the ricotta)

1. Boil sugar with 2 TB water until 118°C
2. Whip egg whites stiff, then add sugar syrup in a stream while whisking. Whip until cool (this is the Italian meringue)
3. Mix raspberries and lemon juice in a blender, then filter
4. Soak gelatin sheets in cold water. Rince. Squeeze out water then melt gently in a small pan over boiling water (double boiler)
5. Add 1/4 of the raspberry pulp to the gelatin, then pour contents into the rest of the raspberry pulp

a) Recipe with ricotta
6a. Blend ricotta with raspberries
7a. Fold in the cooled Italian meringue

b) Recipe with cream
6b. Add the meringue to the raspberry pulp
7b. Whip the cream and fold it into the raspberry-meringue mixture (whose temperature should not be above 20°C)

8. Pour the mixture into the cake pan that is lined with biscuits à la cuillère. Smooth with a spatula. Freeze for one hour, or refrigerate for six to eight hours.
9. Unmold, decorate with fresh berries and serve, with a rapsberry coulis (sauce) if you have one (I didn't).


I was concerned about the lumpy aspect of this mousse, but it turned out OK


It was tricky getting all the little ladyfinger soldiers to stand at attention long enough to pour the filling in


Convinced as I was this was going to flop, I didn't try smoothing the top too carefully


Ta da! The whole thing held together well, even though I had reduced the gelatin from 9g to 7g (still seemed like a lot)


If you don't see any raspberries in the decor, it's because someone hadn't read the memo about not eating the lovely berries I had reserved just for this purpose...

Got milk? Ginger ice milk and pains au lait

Linda of Make Life Sweeter is organizing an event to promote breast-feeding awareness, and has requested that participants post recipes that include milk. I'm all for breastfeeding, and I also like Linda's blog, so I wanted to make a contribution.

Yet I had a hard time finding tempting recipes with milk. For instance the thought of riz au lait (rice pudding?) makes me shudder, but then again, I'm sure Aran's arroz con leche crème brulée would quickly dispel that prejudice.

Finally I chose two recipes: pains au lait (milk rolls), and ginger ice milk.



Pains au lait are a common afternoon snack food for French children. Given they contain milk I always thought that they were a healthier alternative to brioche. But these might as well be called "pains au beurre" since the recipe I used contains 25% butter (as a percentage of the flour) in addition to milk. No wonder kids like them. I myself prefer a good brioche (more eggs, and even more butter...), but these are lovely to take out of the oven for a hungry crowd of children. They can be made plain, or sprinkled with crystallized sugar.

The ginger ice milk on the other hand is a very reasonable indulgence. I got the recipe from Nick Malgieri's Perfect Light Desserts. According to the book there are 86 calories per serving. Isn't that less than an apple? A first for my blog!

My ice milk came out a little soupy, as I had an issue with my ice cream maker. But after firming it up in the freezer, we enjoyed the fresh flavor and surprisingly smooth texture (despite the absence of cream). The ginger flavor is strong but not harsh, tamed by the milk.


Recipe: Ginger Ice Milk


Source: Perfect Light Desserts, by Nick Malgieri and David Joachim
10 servings (86 calories per serving)

- 1 1/2 cups water
[This water is used for making a ginger "tea" with which to flavor the ice. I used 1 cup water as I really didn't want to dilute the ice too much. I intended to try it with milk instead next time, but thankfully Linda warned me in the comments that ginger might curdle the milk.]
- 1/2 cup coarsely chopped peeled ginger (2 1/2 ounces)
- Zest of 1 lemon, stripped off with a vegetable peeler
[I used a microplane grater]
- 2 cups whole milk
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 2 large eggs

Bring the water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Remove from the heat and stir in the ginger and lemon zest. Cover the pan and allow the mixture to steep for 10 minutes. Strain the mixture into a large bowl and cool it to room temperature.



The ginger and lemon zest "tea" after straining

Combine the milk and sugar in a large saucepan and whisk to mix. Place over medium heat, stirring occasionally to make sure the sugar dissolves.

Meanwhile, whisk the eggs in a bowl to break them up.

When the milk boils, whisk a third of it into the egss. Return the remaining milk to a boil over low heat and whisk in the egg mixture in a stream. Cook the custard, whisking constantly, for about 20 seconds. Strain the custard into a bowl and refreigerate it, stirring occasionally, until it is very cold.

Whisk the ginger tea into the custard mixture.

Freeze the mixture in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's directions. [...] Serve the ice in chilled dessert bowls or glasses.[...]




Recipe: Pains au lait

Source: La cuisine d'Annie

- 500g flour
- 15g fresh yeast
[dry instant yeast could certainly be substituted. I think then you would need 5g, or about 1 tspn? Don't hold me to these conversions though!]
- 50g sugar
- 10g salt
- 250g (1/4 liter) milk
- 1 egg
- 125g butter, neither too cold nor too soft
- 1 egg yolk for glazing


Mix flour, yeast, sugar, salt and milk until dough is firm and elastic. Add the egg, and knead for about 5 minutes. Add the butter one small piece (1 tablespoon) at a time. Knead for 5 minutes more.

Let the dough rise in covered bowl for about 1 hour, or until doubled in volume. Punch it down, cover bowl in plastic wrap and place in refrigerator for at least four hours or overnight.


The dough after kneading, and the dough after one hour rising. Doesn't look doubled, even though my kitchen was warm. I proceeded anyway with recipe

[The recipe did not say anything about shaping or baking, so the rest of the instructions are mine]


Left is the dough after one night and a morning in the fridge, where it did rise significantly. I rolled it into a log and chopped it first in half, then in quarters, then each quarter in four pieces. One half of the dough is still in my fridge, waiting for today's snack. I don't know if it will taste yeasty from waiting around so long, we'll see*!.

Cut dough into 16 to 20 pieces (or work with one half first, leaving the other half in the fridge so it doesn't get too warm. This kind of buttery dough is easier to handle when cold).

Shape into balls or "navettes" (the oblong shape I tried but didn't entirely succeed in making. I think the key is to make them more elongated than you want them, as they will puff out as they rise.) Place rolls on baking paper on baking sheet. Cover the rolls, for instance with a large food-grade plastic bag, and proof for one hour to one and a half hours.


I found shaping smooth oblong "navette" shapes is not so easy. The rolls are proofing wrapped in a large plastic bag

Preheat the oven to 220°C.

Brush with egg yolk, snip cuts with kitchen scissors, and optionally sprinkle with crystallized sugar.

Put rolls in the oven, then lower the temperature to 200°C (convection oven. Traditional ovens may need a higher temperature). Squirt steam in oven if you can: I have a gadget on my oven that lets me do it, but you could simply spray some water on the walls of the oven, as described here. Or skip the steam part altogether.

Bake for about 15 minutes, and let cool on rack before eating.


I wasn't sure how to snip them with my scissors, and tried both parallel and perpendicular snips. They both look good, but not quite like the boulangerie petits pains I remember.

Tip: for shaping smooth dough balls, see these instructions from All Recipes. They really improved my shaping technique for round balls of dough. Now I need to find similar help on shaping the oblong "navettes" that are traditional for pains au lait.

* Update the next day: the second half of the recipe came out of the oven a few minutes ago and tastes even better. Photo below, and also the one at the beginning of the pains au lait recipe. What I did differently: I lowered the oven temp to 200°C after putting the rolls in the oven, and baked them a little longer. Or maybe it was the longer retarded fermentation in the fridge that made a difference.

Financiers with Lemon Cream

After my experience with the lemon millefeuille, I knew I wanted to incorporate the delicious lemon cream in another (easier) dessert.

Then a few days later, I received a mysterious package in the mail. It was quite heavy, and I thought it came from friends who recently moved to Hong Kong. When out rolled 9 or 10 of the most beautiful lemons, I was amazed. It was the mother of one of these friends who had sent them. She lives on the Côte d'Azur, and she wanted to share the lemons from her back yard. She had seen a few posts on my blog and knew I love anything lemon-flavored.


Lemons in the mail. Imagine my surprise!

These lemons, which I believe are the same as the lemons from Menton recommended by Pierre Hermé in his original lemon cream recipe, are unbelievably juicy. One small lemon can give something like twice as much flavorful juice as any ordinary lemon.


This lemon looked almost like a grapefruit once I cut it open (after zesting it)


So what to do with this lemon bounty? I made a lemon tart and froze it, which turned out beautifully as we were surprised with a simultaneous visit by my brother and a good friend who lives in Geneva. I made Hermé's lemon cream, in two versions: one per his original recipe, for filling macarons, and the other with added whipped cream and a touch of gelatin, the same I used for the lemon millefeuille (both recipes in the millefeuille link). I froze the standard version, and looked for a dessert to showcase the lightened one. I wasn't eager to launch into the whole caramelized puff pastry adventure again, and wanted something simple.

I then remembered the recipe featured on the cover of Sherry Yard's book, The Secrets of Baking. A chocolate financier with a raspberry ganache piped in the middle.

I tried to make something similar: a regular financier, with a lightened lemon cream piped in the middle. I didn't have the cute doughnut-shaped ring molds (or mini-savarin molds), so of course I had to go purchase those right away. Financier batter is extremely easy to make, and delicious with its combined flavors of almonds and burnt butter. I baked them for 10-15 minutes, and then all I had to do was to pipe in the filling.

Which, the first time around, was harder than I had anticipated (no photos). See, I don't know the first thing about piping. But I'm beginning to discover that if you don't hold the tip slightly buried in the filling that you're piping, you end up with a worm-like shape that is anything but appetizing. Add to that the fact my cream was a little limp (I think I used too much whipped cream, or too little gelatin) and the result was not pretty. I froze the remaining financiers, as well as the cream (I freeze everything!) and forgot about the idea.

Then a few evenings ago I was alone with my mother-in-law who was visiting while my husband was away, and I wondered what to make for dessert (she has a sweet tooth so it's fun to test desserts on her). I defrosted the cream in the fridge for a few hours, defrosted and crisped the financiers by baking them for a few minutes, let them cool, threw a piping tip into a plastic freezer bag, and piped the cream in the center of the savarins.

Well don't you know, they turned out much better than the first time around! Was my cream colder? Did I overnight learn a little about piping? Who knows. But I smiled as my mother in law looked surprised I had whipped this dessert up in five minutes... So Martha of me!

Donc Florence, un grand merci pour ces citrons délicieux qui m'ont permis de gâter tous nos récents visiteurs, tout en découvrant un nouveau dessert! (I had to thank the donor of the lemons in French!)


These financiers are very easy to make. The only trick is to know how much batter to pour into the mold to make plump doughnut shapes without a rim. The ones above seem perfect to me, but the ones featured with the cream have a bit of a lip. I must have used too much batter. Not that it really matters.



Recipe: Financiers with Lemon Cream
This will be short, since I've already posted the recipes for the components of this dessert.

1. Bake the financiers (recipe here) in carefully buttered individual mini-savarin molds until they are an attractive brown color. Cool a few minutes then unmold carefully.

2. Place the cooled financiers in dessert plates. Pipe the very cold lemon cream (recipe here, follow the version that includes whipped cream and a touch of gelatin) in a spiral in the center of each financier, and serve immediately.

English Muffins

English muffins. Now here is a recipe that is easy to make, and has many additional advantages.

To start with, these can be made ahead of time, and stored in the fridge or freezer. Yes you can eat them freshly baked, but I almost prefer them a few hours or even days later, fresh from the toaster. Perhaps because that is the way I've always eaten store-bought English muffins. It does feel strange and slightly sacrilegious to take fresh bread and toast it. Much better to toast something that was made a few days earlier.



Another reason to make these at home is they are not easily available in continental Europe, and especially here in Switzerland, I wouldn't know where to find them.

Finally, you don't need an oven. Now most people have an oven, but they may not want to heat it up in the heart of summer. A few heavy frying pans or better a cast iron skillet and you can make this great bread at home.

I haven't done extensive research on recipes, and don't know if the following is the most authentic. But my family likes these, and if you've never made English muffins, this unfussy recipe might be a good way to start.

Some process photos
Click for a larger image

(I don't quite remember, but I believe in the following photos I made the dough a little less wet than specified by the recipe.)


Cutting the dough into 12 or so pieces


Pieces shaped into balls


Resting the dough balls for 20 minutes weighed down with a baking pan. My baking pans are quite heavy...


The rested balls after removing the top baking pan


Baking the English muffins in several pans. No matter how they were flattened, they tend to dome up, and I have to press down on them after turning them over to make them relatively flat. I wonder what this does to the structure of the bread and to its "nooks and crannies" (for those not in the know, English muffins are supposed to have lots of little holes in them for butter to pool in...). It does cause some minor cracking along the sides. Perhaps there's a better way.


Some have been turned over and squashed down


So these look pretty close to the real thing to me...


Hm, not sure I've achieved nooks and crannies here, but good enough

My notes on the recipe

- Maybe use less liquid: this dough is very, very wet. I have to research whether this level of hydration is essential to the flavor or texture of the muffin. I think once I made these with less water, resulting in a stiffer dough which was easier to handle, and the result seemed quite good. I believe the process photos above were from that batch.
- If you don't significantly reduce the liquid, make sure to flour your hands and work surfaces liberally for shaping
- Cut in 12 or even more pieces for smaller muffins (8 would make really large ones)
- Make sure your pan is not too hot! I've burnt a few. I start with 3-4 on my stove (on a scale going up to 10), and even reduce it down to 1-2 toward the end of my baking session. Keep checking!
- Don't oil your pan, or you'll have a really sticky mess to clean up between the muffins. After a minute or two the muffin crust forms and doesn't stick. This works in all my pans: non-stick, untreated fairly heavy pan, and a small cast-iron skillet.
- Use semolina, not corn meal to coat them. Less conspicuous crunch. But if you only have corn meal, no problem.
- I don't take the 20 minutes rest after shaping too literally: I shape 12 or 14 muffins, clean up a little, then start baking the first ones I shaped. (I'm not saying this is right, it's just what I do)
- Don't bother weighing down with another pan (they really stick, so you have to douse them with semolina), but squish them down when you flip them over.
- Flour your hands when you drop them into the pan. Again, they're sticky-wet.
- I recently used 50g whole wheat, which tasted good.
- I wonder about the recipe's suggestion that it's up to you whether you let the dough rise a few hours or overnight. I thought the amount of yeast you use should be inversely proportional to the rising time (short rise, lots of yeast, long rise, less yeast). Wouldn't you need a smaller amount of yeast if you leave the dough out overnight, especially in the summer? I use cold milk and room temperature water, but when I wake up I find a dough that is extremely bubbly, perhaps collapsed (if that's the term). And the resulting flavor might be a little too yeasty for me. I'll fiddle some with the recipe, and might try storing the dough in the fridge overnight. But the original recipe author is quite specific about leaving it out on a counter, so what do I know.

Recipe: English Muffins

Source: Winos and Foodies

I have made no changes to the recipe below. For my 2-cents' worth (or my grain of salt as we say in French), see my notes above.

2 teaspoons dried yeast granules
1/2 teaspoon sugar
250ml warm water
125ml warm milk
350g high grade flour
100g standard flour
1 teaspoon salt
rice flour or fine cornmeal

Put the yeast and sugar in a small bowl with half the warm water. Stir and set aside for a few minutes, then add the remaining water and the milk.
Put the flour and salt in a large bowl and use your hand to mix in the yeast, water and milk mixture. Knead the mixture which will be sticky, thoroughly in the bowl (or use the dough hook of an electric mixer).
Cover the bowl with a damp tea towel and set aside to rise until more than doubled in bulk. Although this may take only a couple of hours, the dough can be allowed to rise overnight. Deflate the dough by pulling it away from the sides of the bowl. Lift it out of the bowl and divide into 8 pieces.
Drop each piece on to a tray liberally dusted with rice flour or fine cornmeal and roll them over until well coated.
Form each piece into a thick disc.
Place the disks on a baking tray and place another tray on top.
Leave to rest and rise 20 minutes, then remove top tray.
Place a cast iron griddle or large frying pan over low heat.
When only moderately hot place four of the muffins on it and cook for about ten minutes until light beige on the bottom.
Turn the muffins over and cook the second side for a similar length of time.
Wrap the cooked muffins in a dry tea towel while you cook the remaining four.
Pull apart and eat while still warm.
For toasting pull the muffins apart and toast on both sides.

Ah, I love to have a bag of these in my freezer!


I think this batch has some nooks and crannies, right?

Tarte aux framboises (raspberry tart)

We have been enjoying lots of strawberries, cherries and rapsberries this season. Switzerland is a lovely place for berries!

Now we didn't pick these raspberries ourselves, but I got them at the farm which is a few hundred meters away. And I have almost as warm a feeling toward these raspberries as I did toward the strawberries we picked ourselves.



The amazing thing about many farms around Zurich is you can buy eggs, milk and fresh produce on faith: the farm "shop" is unattended (save by a camera in some cases), and you can help yourself and are trusted to put the right sum in the cash box.

Our local farm is not quite so trusting, and offers a huge produce "distributor," or a big closet whose compartments snap open when you enter the right sum of money.

When I bought these raspberries, for some reason the machine swallowed my 5 franc coin and produced no raspberries in exchange. I could have rung the bell, but the sign was clear: please do not disturb from 12:30 to 1:30 during the lunch break. This being Switzerland, I took the request seriously. So I left a note.

A few hours later, the farmer called me on my cell phone, and when I returned to collect my raspberries she gave me two boxes instead of the one I had paid for, to make up for the inconvenience.

The Swiss are not always warm and fuzzy, but they are very service-oriented, and will make it up to you when a mistake is made. I will gladly shop at this farm again.





I was again surprised at how well my tart came out. My husband's birthday was yesterday, and raspberries are his favorite fruit. I followed the same procedure as for the strawberry tart. This time the crème pâtissière wasn't too runny (I cooked it longer), but the crust was a little overbaked. Even though they wouldn't eat any of the final product, my 3 and 5-year-old daughters helped me place the rapsberries on the cream ("no yellow! I don't want to see any yellow!") and I lightly brushed the berries with the leftover glaze from the strawberry tart. Delicious!



And I just found out that Zorra of 1x umrühren is hosting an event for which this post seems appropriate: "Swiss National Day: Red, white or Swiss." This will be my contribution, I hope it helps to make her feel less homesick for Switzerland!

Tarte aux fraises (strawberry tart)

A few days ago I made my first strawberry tart. Which is surprising given strawberry tarts were my birthday cake throughout childhood, and is one of my favorite desserts to this day. I guess usually when we have good strawberries in the house, they don't stay around long enough to be made into a dessert.



But last weekend we went strawberry-picking with the girls and their teenage cousins, bringing back more strawberries than we could eat in one or two sittings. I sorted through our 3 kg of strawberries: the lovely ones I set aside for a tart, the medium-nice ones we ate with a little sugar and the bruised ones I ground up for sorbet (which was a disappointment as it developed a plastic flavor from the plastic container I left the puree in for two days in the fridge).



I was concerned the crust would get soggy, so I brushed it with strawberry glaze to insulate it and assembled the tart only minutes before serving it. The insulation proved totally unnecessary as four of us wolfed down the tart in no time.



The pastry cream was too runny. I think I didn't boil it long enough. But I still enjoyed its vanilla flavor, even though I am not a pastry cream fan, as mentioned earlier. I think home-made pastry cream is always better, and when there's real vanilla bean in it, I could eat it with a spoon!





Recipe: Tarte aux fraises (Strawberry tart)



1. Pie shell
Make a pre-baked pie shell, for instance using the recipe here. Instructions for blind baking it can be found here.

2. Crème pâtissière (pastry cream)
Source: Pierre Hermé, Secrets Gourmands

Ingredients
- 250g milk (1/4 liter)
- 23g corn starch
- 62g sugar (divided in two)
- 3 egg yolks
- 25g butter
- 1/2 to 1 vanilla bean

Place the corn starch and half the sugar in a saucepan with a thick bottom. Add the milk slowly while whisking. Split the vanilla bean, scrape seeds, and add bean + seeds to the milk. While whisking, bring to a boil.

In another saucepan, whisk the egg yolks with the remaining sugar, for three minutes. Pour in the milk and corn starch mixture in a thin stream, whisking continuously. Bring to a boil and remove from the fire as soon as you see the first big bubbles [I think mine could have boiled a little longer, it was too runny]. Remove the vanilla bean and immerse the saucepan in a ice cold water bath (put ice cubes and water in a big bowl).

Once the cream has cooled to 50°C, add the butter, turning quickly with a whisk. The butter should not be added when the cream is too hot (over 60°C), or the cream will be grainy and the butter will lose its fresh flavor.

You can flavor the cream with:
- Coffee [of course not for use with the strawberry tart]: add 2.5g instant coffee diluted in a teaspoon of water + 2.5g natural coffee extract
Or with 1 to 2 tablespoons of one of the following:
- Cointreau
- Grand Marnier
- Kirsch
- Old brown rhum ("agricole")

3. Strawberries
If the strawberries are clean, I wouldn't bother washing them. If they're sandy, rinse them quickly and dry them carefully.

4. Glaze
[I think you can simply make a glaze from currant jelly, boiling it with a little water. I didn't have any jelly in the house, so I had to make this glaze from scratch, which tasted very much of strawberries. This glaze keeps for up to a month in the fridge.]

Source: Pierre Hermé, Secrets Gourmands

Ingredients
- 250g strawberries
- 200g sugar
- 10g pectin ("Vitpris" in France) [I used instead a kind of sugar sold specifically for making jams, I assume it contains pectin. Yes I happen to have this sugar at home because I keep buying it by mistake instead of regular sugar! I was elated to find a use for it, though I still have close to a kg to get rid of...]
- 1 tspn lemon juice

Wash the strawberries, dry them, hull them, puree them with a blender [I used a Bamix immersion blender], filter through a sieve, then pour into a saucepan. Heat the puree, then add the sugar and the pectin. Bring to a boil. Boil for 2 minutes while removing foam carefully [I didn't]. Let it cool.

5. Assembly
Spread a thin layer of glaze on the baked crust. Let it dry for a few minutes. Then spread about 1 cm (more or less, depending on your preference) of crème pâtissière on the crust. If the strawberries are large, cut them in half. Place them decoratively [I crammed as many in as possible, not focusing too much on esthetics] in the tart shell, starting with the largest ones in the center and scaling down toward the edges. Brush with glaze using a brush. If the glaze is too thick, dilute it with a tspn or two of water. Serve as soon as possible.

Sesame Semolina Crackers

Wild Yeast is one of the best food blogs I know. The subjects, the photos, the style of writing are all beautiful and very instructive. If ever I decide one day to start experimenting with sourdough and serious bread-making, this will be my first place to learn. For the moment though, I'm happy simply admiring Susan's work.

A perfect recipe

But this recipe for crackers caught my attention, and I'm delighted to add it to my repertoire. No yeast, no rising, only four minutes in the oven. The crackers are extremely thin yet resilient. They stay crunchy even if left out for a while. They're pretty even if you break them. You can play with flavorings. They are somewhat healthier than other snacks. And, completely addictive.

So really, a perfect recipe: easy, original, tasty, not fussy, somewhat healthy, the crackers store well, and lend themselves to variations.



For those who don't have gadgets...

Susan and I both used the pasta roller attachment to our Kitchenaid to roll out very thin sheets of dough. I went as far as level 6, I believe she made hers even thinner. I was happy to use my new toy, and yes, it makes the rolling out process a little faster.


The crackers after rolling out, brushing with oil and sprinking with salt. Rolling out with the pasta roller lets you make such thin sheets the dough can get a little wrinkly. But the wrinkles only add hand-made charm to the crackers.

However, you do not need a pasta roller. I tried rolling a few crackers by hand and had no difficulty, as you can see here.


The dough is easy to handle, and barely needs a dusting of flour for rolling out by hand.


The two crackers on the left -- marked with herbs -- were hand-rolled. The two on the right were machine-rolled.


The front two crackers were hand-rolled.

I did bake the crackers on a preheated baking stone. I should have tested without the stone, for readers who don't have one. But I imagine preheating a cookie sheet in the oven and placing the crackers on it to bake would probably have a similar effect.

Finally I used my pizza peel to slide the crackers onto the stone, but that really isn't necessary. Just put a piece of baking paper on the back of a cookie sheet, then use the cookie sheet to slide the crackers with the paper onto the preheated stone or cookie sheet in the oven.

Variations

I played with a few variations, sprinkling the crackers with pepper, grated cheese and rosemary. The pepper was good for those who like spicy crackers. The cheese very tasty too, though I kept it light (this isn't pizza!). The rosemary did not adhere to the crackers, so I can't say it added much. I tried rolling some rosemary leaves in with the dough, but this caused tearing.

I also substituted a good portion of whole-wheat flour for the all-purpose flour, and the result was great. Once I didn't have enough semolina flour, so I substitued corn meal for part of the semolina. I liked the result very much, though it made them a little grainier.


A cracker sprinkled with grated cheese (Gruyère). Next I'll try parmesan.



I tried reproducing the photo Susan took but hers is better, do have a look at her post



Sometimes when I was a little too quick to roll the dough, it tore a little. But even with tears, the crackers hold up very well. I find it gives them a lacy effect


Recipe: Sesame-Semolina Flatbreads

Source: Wild Yeast

(adapted from “Sardinian Crackers” in Savory Baking from the Mediterranean by Anissa Helou)

Yield: 12 large flatbreads

Time:

* Mix/rest: 45 minutes
* Roll/bake (total time for 12 flatbreads): 25 minutes

Ingredients:

* 150 g flour
* 150 g semolina
* 22 g (2 T.) black sesame seeds
[Susan used black sesame seeds (I only had white), which makes the crackers even more visually appealing.]
* 6 g (1 t.) salt
* 170 g lukewarm water
* olive oil for brushing
* coarse Kosher salt for topping

Method:

1. Preheat the oven, with baking stone, to 450F.
2. Mix flour, semolina, sesame seeds, and salt in a medium bowl.
3. Add water are stir to incorporate into the dry ingredients.
4. Turn dough onto an unfloured counter and knead for 3 minutes. Cover the dough and let it rest for 15 minutes.
5. Knead for another 2 minutes. Cover and rest for 20 minutes.
6. Divide the dough into 12 or more pieces and form them into balls.
7. Cut a piece of parchment paper the approximate size of your baking stone.
8. Roll a ball of dough through a pasta roller, starting with the thickest setting and adjusting the thickness setting down with each successive pass, to the desired thinness. Alternatively, roll out as thin as possible with a rolling pin.
9. Place the rolled flatbread on the parchment. Repeat with as many flatbreads as will fit on the parchment.
10. Brush the flatbreads lightly with olive oil and sprinkle with a small pinch of Kosher salt.
11. Transfer the breads, parchment and all, onto the stone. Bake until the edges are nicely brown and rippled, and the tops have golden brown patches, about 3 – 4 minutes.
12. While one batch is baking, roll out the next batch.
13. Cool on a wire rack. Break into pieces to serve.

The Power of Packaging

I bought these cardboard boxes on my last visit to Mora, thinking they might come in useful for gift-giving. Not that I give away so many sweets, but I do like boxes!


I recently remembered them and decided a friend's celebration of her two older children's first communion was a good occasion for baking and giving cannelés and macarons.

What a difference a nice box makes! Home-baked goodies seem much more professional presented in a simple white box.


Lemon and salted caramel macarons. I also made coffee macarons but they were a failure. Argh, macarons!


I also purchased some plastic bags for smaller gifts.



(I gave one of these to my husband to take to work... and he left it on the bus. I hope whoever found the macarons ate them!)

Homemade Pasta

I am so lucky. A dear friend gave me the pasta roller accessory for my Kitchenaid mixer.

I had been longing for a pasta machine for literally ten years. That's when I bought one as a wedding gift (at Broadway Panhandler... a wonderful shop in New York) for a work colleague.



I had no idea it was so easy* to make delicious pasta. I will never buy fresh pasta again! Really and truly. Just mix some eggs and flour, knead (with a little help from a machine or using strong arms), rest, then roll and cut.



This was my first batch. The only difficulty I had was when the pasta stuck together after cutting.


My first batch stuck together

However I have since learned how easy it is to avoid sticking. Either let the sheets of pasta dry for half an hour or more before cutting them into fettucine or spaghetti. The dough feels a little like leather at that stage, stiffer but still pliable. Or simple dust the sheets with lots of flour.

Hand-cranked vs. electrical pasta roller vs. hand rolling

The Kitchenaid accessory works exactly like a hand-cranked machine; the advantage is you have an extra free hand to catch the pasta with. If you own a stand mixer, I would recommend getting this attachment, as extra ease of use means you're more likely to use it. But I believe a hand-cranked machine works very well too.

Of course, if you want to be a purist, nothing less than hand rolling the pasta will do. The stretching motions, and the irregularity of the surface of the wooden rolling pin all apparently make for better texture than the compression by metal cylinders. I may never be able to judge for myself, as this is one challenge I'm not eager to pursue. And I believe many Italian households use a rolling machine, so that's good enough for me.

However do stay away from extrusion contraptions (the kind to squeeze out tubular pasta). These have overall bad reviews, from what I can tell. Even the Kitchenaid one.

Ravioli

I was surprised that ravioli weren't that time-consuming or difficult to make. Perhaps because I'm used to spending hours on desserts? All you have to do is mix a simple filling (I tried two: spinach & ricotta and asparagus & ricotta, both were good, but I still have to find the perfect recipe for the filling), roll out a sheet of pasta, plop little mounds of filling regularly along one edge, wet the dough around the mounds with a finger dipped in water, then fold over the other edge of the dough. Press around the dough to seal (avoid air bubbles if you can), and use a pastry cutter to cut into ravioli.








Sauces

The different sources I've read so far about pasta (the Dean & Deluca cookbook, Marcella Hazan) indicate that fresh pasta and factory-made pasta are used with different sauces. Fresh pasta benefits from lighter flavored, butter or cream-based sauces, whereas factory-made pasta can withstand the stronger flavors of olive-oil based sauces better.




I tried a slap-dash version of carbonara with prosciutto and enjoyed it, though I have to confess I also like my homemade pasta with olive oil and herbs. But I must develop my sauces repertoire to showcase homemade pasta better.

Storage

Did you know homemade pasta dries very well, can be stored for several weeks, and still tastes better than most store-bought fresh pasta?



Dry fettucine or tagliatelle

As for ravioli, flash-freeze them in a single layer for half an hour to an hour, then you can move them to a plastic bag and store them for several weeks. Just drop them frozen into a big pot of boiling water, and they're as good as fresh-made.


Frozen ravioli

Recipe: Homemade Pasta Dough

This is embarrassingly simple*:

Weigh four eggs. Add double the amount of flour and a pinch of salt. Knead until dough is neither crumbly nor sticky. You may have to add a few teaspoons of milk. Cut and form into four balls. Rest for half an hour well wrapped. Then roll as directed by your pasta machine maker.

Quantity: this makes two meals of tagliatelle for a family of five, three of whom are small children.

*Or at least pasta-making seems easy to me: I am a beginner, and if I have missed some of the finer subleties of pasta-making, feel free to let me know, I don't want to remain ignorant!

Lemon Millefeuille

Once I learned how to make caramelized puff pastry, making a millefeuille (meaning "thousand sheets", also known as mille-feuilles or napoleon) was the next logical step. The problem was, I've never really liked millefeuille.

What is a millefeuille?
In France, a classic millefeuille is a three-layer sandwich of puff pastry enclosing vanilla pastry cream (or pastry cream lightened with whipped cream), with striped fondant icing (the pourable kind, not the roll-out kind.) You can see a photo of this traditional dessert here. Not being a fan of pastry cream, this was never one of my favorites.

Inspiration for a lemon millefeuille
What finally prompted me to make something similar to a classic millefeuilles was a side-note in the Pierre Hermé recipe for lemon cream:

"Un de mes desserts préférés est le croustillant au citron, composé de deux rectangles de pâte feuilletée caramélisée, fourrés d'une épaisse couche de crème au citron légèrement gélatinée et additionnée d'un peu de chantilly, au coeur de laquelle je glisse un sablé à la cannelle."

or in English:

"One of my favorite desserts is a crunchy lemon dessert, made of two rectangles of caramelized puff pastry, filled with a thick layer of lemon cream to which a little gelatin and some whipped cream have been added, in the center of which I hide a cinnamon sablé cookie."

This sounded interesting. I like his lemon cream, and the caramelized puff pastry is delicious. How could the combination be bad? I wasn't sure about the cinnamon cookie but was prepared to try.

I had guests coming for dinner, and since the Sugar High Friday theme this month is citrus desserts, I decided to try my hand at this recipe.

Guessing at the recipe
The only thing was, it was hardly a recipe. How much gelatin? When and how to include the gelatin in the cream? How much whipped cream? What kind of cookie to bake? How should the whole thing be assembled?

I couldn't help grumbling that if this was one of Hermé's favorite desserts, he really should have provided a recipe with detailed instructions, rather than a brief side-note. But I looked upon it as an adventure, knowing our dinner guests would be easy-going about results.

Result: delicious components, tricky assembly
The result was encouraging. The cream was perfect: firm enough but not gelatinous, very rich and lemony but not heavy. The first batch of puff pastry was undercooked and warped, but the second one was more successful.

Two aspects of this dessert gave me some trouble: esthetics, and preparing it ahead of time.

One large cake is hard to cut and gets soggy fast
For my first version, I tried to make something similar to a traditional French millefeuilles: spreading the cream on a large rectangle of baked pastry, adding cinnamon sablé cookies, topping it with one more layer of baked pastry (as opposed to two for the traditional version), then cutting the whole thing into a crisp rectangle, as shown here with multiple photos, and here with a video.


Cinnamon sablé cookies embedded in the lemon cream. I'm not sure they're necessary.


The cake before trimming the edges


Cutting the caramelized pastry shell was difficult. I used a long serrated knife and sawed gingerly through the brittle crust.

A crisp rectangle. Yeah. Half the cream oozed out the sides, despite using the utmost precaution to saw the cake. I smoothed the cream around the edges as well as I could, and served a decent-looking rectangular cake to my guests, knowing the whole thing would explode upon serving. As I ate some of the sawed-off scraps I thought "yum! at least it will taste delicious."


I managed to make the cake look presentable, but dreaded having to cut it into serving sizes.


Not very pretty slicing into the cake. Still, it was somewhat easier than I had anticipated, as the pastry layers had absorbed humidity from the cream. Which presented another problem. (Apologies for the poor quality of these photos, it was night time and guests were waiting to be fed.)

Cutting it into individual portions was not quite as difficult as I had expected. That's when I realized the pastry had absorbed humidity from the cream, and was less crisp than initially.

The final taste was somewhat disappointing, compared to the scraps I had snacked on during its assembly. The pastry was not really soggy, but not crisp either. It tasted just like those millefeuilles from my childhood, and now I knew what I didn't like about them, in addition to the pastry cream: they had been assembled too far ahead of time. The couple hours (in this case, about four) that the cake waited before being served spoiled the final texture. In theory caramelizing the puff pastry insulates it somewhat against moisture, but I guess not sufficiently.

So I had made something that was almost impossible to cut, and tasted good only when freshly assembled.

How to prepare esthetically-pleasing individual portions at the last minute
I decided to make individual portions, cutting rectangles of pastry ahead of time and filling them with cream before serving. But I was worried the filling would look gloppy. I wanted crisp and geometric, no oozing.


Cutting the pastry shell ahead of time into individual portions

I piped the filling. Having no piping skills, I didn't want to try anything fancy, so I made these long cylinders with my largest piping tip (size 13, which I guess is 1.3 cm 1.5 to 1.6cm in diameter). I abandoned the cinnamon cookie.


Two rows of cream, a little too far apart.

My first pastry squares were a little too wide (5cm) to hold two cream cylinders, too narrow for three. Slightly less than 4 cm wide worked best, and looked most elegant.


A narrower pastry shell works better


I'm beginning to like the looks of this millefeuille. Too bad the crust here is from my first batch, underbaked and not flaky enough.

Last minute assembly is not a problem if you've cut the pastry rectangles ahead of time, have filled the pastry bag with cream, and have confectioner's sugar and sieve ready for the final dusting.

All in all, this was an interesting baking adventure, and I thank the organizers of Sugar High Friday, Hélène at Tartelette and Jennifer at Domestic Goddess for choosing such a good topic and thereby encouraging me to try something new.





Recipe: Lemon Millefeuille

Inspired by Pierre Hermé

8 to 10 servings


1. Caramelized puff pastry



- One recipe inverse puff pastry: see recipe in this post
[If you don't want to make it yourself, you can probably use ready-made puff pastry, preferably made with only butter]
- 40g sugar
- 30g confectioner's sugar

Clear out a shelf in your refrigerator and choose a baking sheet that will fit in the fridge. Roll out the puff pastry to 2mm [I think I could have rolled mine thinner]. Cut it to the dimensions of your baking sheet [I think it's important to cut the edges to allow regular expansion of the dough.] Place a sheet of parchment paper on the pan, and wet it slightly with a brush. Place the dough on the paper.

[Dock the dough by pricking it all over with a fork. The recipe doesn't say to do this but I read it in enough other recipes to think it might be necessary.]

Cover with plastic wrap and put the baking pan in the refrigerator. Let the dough rest 1 to 2 hours so it doesn't shrink when baked.

Preheat oven to 230°C.

Dust the dough with sugar [I would say less than the amount specified here]. Put the pan in the oven, and immediately lower oven to 190°C. Total baking time will be about 20 to 24 minutes, as follows:

Bake for 8 minutes then cover with a cooling rack to prevent dough from rising too much.

[I covered with a parchment paper and a baking sheet after as little as four minutes, as the dough rises a lot and fast; but remember to heat the baking sheet in the oven so it doesn't slow overall baking time]

Bake for another 8 minutes [or more. My first batch was undercooked.]

Remove baking sheets from oven, increase temperature to 250°C. If you used a cooling rack to compress the dough, replace it with baking parchment and a baking sheet on top. Turn over both baking sheets, holding them tightly together. Remove the first pan and parchment paper which are now on top. The bottom of the dough is now facing up. Dust it uniformly with confectioner's sugar.


Dusting the partially-baked pastry with confectioner's sugar

Bake for 8 minutes until it caramelizes. Keep an eye on it to prevent burning. The sugar will first turn yellow, then melt, and ultimately caramelize. Remove pastry from oven. The top should be smooth and shiny, the bottom is crunchy with the incrusted sugar. [I fixed non-caramelized spots with a crème brulée torch.]

Let the pastry cool completely on a rack, then wrap it tightly until you need it.


Parts of the pastry were not fully caramelized. I placed it under the grill, but as the edges were beginning to burn I decided to finish the caramelization with my small crème-brulée torch



This was my first batch, warped and undercooked, perhaps because I used a warped, cold baking sheet to cover the dough.


2. Lemon Cream*



Source still Pierre Hermé

The changes I made based on Hermé's instructions for the "croustillant au citron" are in blue

Ingredients
- Zest from three lemons
- 220g sugar
- 160g freshly squeezed lemon juice
- 4 eggs
- 300g butter

Additions to turn this into a millefeuille cream:
- 2,5g gelatin (1 1/2 sheets), soaked for 5 min. in cold water
- About 150g very cold cream

Mix the sugar and lemon zest: turn for one minute with a spatula so the sugar absorbs the flavor of the zest. Whip in the eggs, then the lemon juice.

For the millefeuille cream, add the soaked and drained gelatin at this point. This being my first experience with gelatin, I heated the lemon juice and added the gelatin to it before adding both to the sugar and eggs. I didn't know if 85°C was warm enough to dissolve gelatin. I think it is, so don't bother heating the lemon juice separately.

Place the bowl in a simmering hot water bath and cook the mixture while whisking continuously until it reaches 82-83°C.

Remove it from the hot water bath, filter it and let it cool to 50°C before adding the butter. If it were any warmer the butter would melt and become greasy.

Place a bowl in the freezer for 15 minutes, then whip the cream until it holds peaks.

Cut the butter into 1cm cubes. Mix it into the lemon cream in four or five times, whisking rapidly to create an emulsion. The best solution is to use an immersion blender, which makes the cream very smooth and silky and gives it a lot of stability.

Fold the whipped cream into the lemon cream, then cover with plastic wrap and store in refrigerator for an hour or so.


3. Assembly



Put a large, plain tip (1.3 about 1.5 cm) in a pastry bag. Fill it with lemon cream. If you plan to assemble the cakes later, put plastic wrap over the tip and store the bag in the refrigerator until needed.

Cut the caramelized puff pastry into twice as many 4x11 cm rectangles as you want to make servings. (The amounts of cream given in this recipe allowed me to make one cake serving four, plus about four to six individual portions. There was puff pastry left over). To cut the pastry, use a long serrated knife with a sawing motion. If you plan to assemble the cakes later, carefully wrap the rectangles, either individually or with parchment paper separating them, or they will stick together.

When ready to serve, place a pastry rectangle on a dessert plate. Pipe two cylinders of cream on the shell (use a knife or scissors to cut the cylinder away from the piping tip), then place another pastry rectangle on top. Sprinkle with confectioner's sugar and serve immediately.

I am looking for a little extra garnish to dress up the plate. I used lemon wedges, but since they are not really edible I'm not happy with this option. Perhaps I can make candied lemon slices like Aran from Cannelle et Vanille did.



My husband taste-testing one of the millefeuilles. And in the background, hanging under the lamp, my first batch of homemade pasta, coming soon on this blog!

*Update July 2008
For another (easier) recipe using this delicious lemon cream, see my post on financiers with lemon cream.

Macarons

I feel ready to post about macarons. Several years after the craze hit the blogging world, I can finally say I have made some myself.


My first really successful macarons were the lemon ones on the left, using chef Pang's recipe. The chocolate ones were the funny baseball cap ones I mentioned earlier, and the caramel-hazelnut ones on the right were too wet and their feet spread out too much.

Tricky little things
These little treats are often annoying and unpredictable, as I described in an earlier post. Three ingredients go into the cookies: egg whites, confectioner's sugar and ground almonds. But simple they are not. Egg whites must be aged, nuts must be ground with sugar and sifted, batter must be mixed just so, shapes piped and left to crust (or not), cookie pans doubled to produce "feet" (lacy stuff around the edges), water squirted under parchment paper to facilitate removal of cookies, etc.

I am not yet ready to give "Astrid's secrets to macarons," as I do not have consistently good or predictable results (but I can point you toward one recent and excellent tutorial by Hélène at Tartelette). I will however tell you about my experiences with two recipes I tried multiple times: those by Pierre Hermé (of course) and Chef Pang Kok Keong.

Finding a recipe that's not too sweet
Pierre Hermé does not add any sugar to his egg whites, and chef Pang uses the French meringue method (a small amount of sugar is whisked into the egg whites). I have not tried the Italian meringue method (a hot syrup is whisked into the egg whites). It is my understanding that this latter version is much more consistent in its results, but also that it is sweeter and more like meringue. I find macarons are plenty sweet enough as it is, and if I wanted to make meringue, I would!

I really, really wanted to succeed with the Hermé recipe. His seems to have the lowest amount of sugar of any I have come across. And honestly, I find macarons are in general a little too sweet. But I simply could not get consistent results, and most of the time the ones I made using his recipe came out limp and too fragile. Except for the chocolate ones, in which perhaps the cocoa acts as a stabilizing force.

I then tried chef Pang Kok Keong’s recipe and had much better results. Yes there is a little more sugar, but not as much as many other recipes out there, and it seems to make the batter more cooperative. Also I suspect the higher baking temperature and longer baking time makes these easier to handle. Though they do tend to brown a little too much.

Flavor experiments: hazelnut-caramel, coffee, lemon, and chocolate


Hazelnut macarons with salted caramel filling. Recipe below.

The combination of hazelnut macaron and salted caramel filling came from Veronica's Test Kitchen, and it is delicious. Recipe follows. Several of my tasters said it was the best I made.


Coffee macarons: the cookies are flavored with coffee extract, and the filling is coffee buttercream.

My husband prefers the coffee flavored ones, and I feel they're a tie with the caramel ones. I won't go into my struggles with the filling (I had never made buttercream before, and every time it failed to coalesce into something smooth). But being sandwiched between two shells, the cream's lumpiness is not too apparent. And it tastes good.


Lemon macarons. See what I mean about unpredictable results? I think these were left to dry for several hours longer than necessary, which may have made them lop-sided. A more successful batch is pictured at the bottom of this post.

Another good flavor is lemon. I used Hermé's recipe for lemon cream, available here. It's very buttery, but has a lovely texture and works well in a macaron. And the immersion blender trick -- also used by chef Pang for his caramel filling --worked well for me as a way to produce a satiny filling.


These chocolate macarons were good, but a bit soggy for some reason.

The chocolate ones are good, but they lack a little zip. I find the sweetness of the macaron really needs to be contrasted with either bitterness (dark caramel or coffee), saltiness (salted caramel), or tartness (lemon cream). I tried a little candied ginger in the center of the chocolate ones but wasn't too pleased with the result. Still, spiciness might be something to explore.


These are all hazelnut-caramel macarons, but some were overbaked. They were darker and crunchier but good too. And a lot easier to pry off the parchment paper.

Why make your own macarons?
As always, the question that begs to be asked is why bother? They're tricky, and they're not my favorite sweet (though if I consider them candy as opposed to cookies I find I really enjoy them in small quantities, with coffee for instance.)

Yes, the challenge is fun. But there are a few other great things about them:
1. They make good gifts, as many people seem to love them
2. They use up left-over egg whites: freeze your egg whites, and when you are ready to make macarons, defrost them either overnight in the fridge or for a few hours on your counter. The egg whites will then be properly "aged" and even better than freshly separated ones. (I wouldn't use frozen egg whites if they were to be served raw).
3. The flavor possibilities seem endless, and encourage the baker to tinker around.
4. They actually improve in flavor and texture a day or two after making them. And they freeze beautifully. That is fabulous to me. Most of the things I love need to be baked freshly to be enjoyed: croissants, brioche, financiers, chouquettes, you name it, are best fresh from the oven, which is not always convenient. Macarons are the perfect make-ahead treat.



Recipe: Chef Pang Kok Keong’s Macaron Caramel Fleur de Sel
From Chubby Hubby

For the macaron cookie
- 500g ground almond
[For the caramel macarons I used all toasted hazelnut instead of almonds. I think I toasted the ground hazelnuts for about 10 or 15 minutes at 150°C in the oven, until I could smell them.]
- 900g icing sugar
- 440g egg white
- 120g sugar

Sieve your ground almond and icing sugar into a mixing bowl. Make sure the mixture is lump-free. Beat the egg whites using an electrical mixer with a whisk attachment at high speed until you can see a line made by the whisk going round. Then add in the sugar while the mixer is at medium speed. Make a stiff meringue. Fold the meringue into the dry sieved ingredients until you get a homogeneous mix, taking care not to overfold it, as normal meringue are very delicate.

Pipe the mixture onto a silpat with a no. 5 plain tube into 3cm balls (The cookies will spread to approximately 5cm). If the mixture is too thick, you’ll see a tip sticking up from the balls (from where you piped them) even after you finish piping the last row. If this happens, give the tray a little tap so that you’ll get a nice smooth surface.

Leave the piped macaron cookies out to form a skin before baking them at 160 degrees Celsius in a fan oven for approximately 14-16 minutes. When totally cooled, sandwich two cookies together with either buttercream, firm mamarlade, or a caramel filling.

Caramel fleur de sel
- 200g sugar
- 1 vanilla pod
- 200g cream
- 3.75g fleur de sel
- 140g butter, chilled

In a 1 litre heavy based pot, cook the sugar, stirring all the time to get an even caramel.
[I think I let it cook until 190°C, to get an almost bitter caramel, which I like as a contrast to the macaron, but sadly I forgot to make note of the exact temperature].

Then add in the vanilla pod, scraped. Add in the warm cream a bit at a time as it will bubble up and splatter. Then add in the fleur de sel. Stir to make sure all the caramel has dissolved. Cool the mixture to approximately 40 degrees Celsius. Add in the well chilled butter, cut into cubes. Using an immersion blender, blend in the butter till you achieve a smooth glossy paste. Line the surface of the caramel with plastic wrap or greaseproof paper to prevent a skin from forming and chill in the fridge until needed.

An aside on food coloring and macarons

I don't understand why suddenly it's OK to use loads of food coloring in home-baked foods. Yes many of the macarons out there are adorable in their peppy colors. And color is a good way to indicate what's inside the macaron. My macarons all tend to look the same (unless I overbake them), and definitely not very zippy. But really, when I went into Pierre Hermé's shop a few days ago on my last visit to Paris (yes I know I'm fortunate), I nearly gagged at the brightly colored, metallic paint jobs on his latest "collection." I would love those colors on my finger nails (uhm, no, not really) or on my car, but not on my food.

If food coloring were used only on macarons, fine, I could live with it. But now it seems like it's cropping up all over the place, and I don't trust what I see in the patisserie window any more. That lovely raspberry coulis, does it owe its color to the ripeness of the fruit or to chemistry? Am I too naive? I guess ice cream often has food coloring in it (orange melon color? green pistachio color?), but I don't want to know about it!


Lemon macarons. Tinted yellow using turmeric.

In an attempt to find a natural alternative, I followed a suggestion posted here and used turmeric to tint these lemon macarons yellow. The trick is apparently to eliminate the flavor of the turmeric by toasting it along with the almonds in the oven. They came out pretty, but unfortunately I could taste the turmeric. It was a brand new bottle, maybe stale turmeric would work better. It didn't really spoil the macarons though.

But maybe using turmeric is cheating also. Shape, color and flavor should be a product of the major ingredients used in the recipe, not of trickery. Ah, but what about the magic of baking? OK, I'll live with trickery, as long as it's all natural.

For pink macarons, some use beet juice, but I find once it's baked the color loses its freshness. I tried grinding up some dehydrated strawberries (from my Special K cereal!) but there too, the color faded in the oven. Anyway, who needs red-fruit flavored macarons? Luckily my favorite flavors -- coffee, hazelnut-caramel and chocolate -- all are colored naturally. And lemon, well, it can just stay white.

Even so, many recipes suggest enhancing the chocolate macaron color with a few drops of red food coloring. Seriously, I find that disturbing. There's cocoa in those macarons, isn't that brown enough?

End of rant. My apologies if I offended anyone of the wonderful bloggers out there who produce lovely jewel-colored macarons. I would be delighted to eat any you make, and who knows, I may also eat my words one day for the simple joy of making artful-looking food.

Pretzels

Different people have different ideas of what makes a perfect pretzel. I don't know much about pretzels in the US, or in particular at ball games. The pretzels I wanted to recreate are the kind that you can find all over Southern Germany, Alsace and Switzerland. I'm sure there's variations among these too, but I am not well-informed enough to know them.

Lye?
What I was after was a dark, shiny pretzel with an elegant shape. Reading different recipes on the web, I discovered that if I really want to be authentic, I need to dip the pretzels in a lye solution (hence the "laugen" in "Laugenbrezel", which I never understood until now). In theory I could have purchased the necessary substance ("Natriumhydroxid" or NaOH) in a pharmacy, but given it is quite toxic, can produce rashes or burns, and requires special handling, I decided to start with something simpler, if not as authentic: a baking soda solution. You can find a whole debate on the merits of different kinds of bathing or glazing solutions on The Fresh Loaf.

Shaping
One point I didn't want to compromise on was shaping. In the link above, there are photos of some tasty looking bread, but not, to my mind, pretzels: the chubby rope of dough was simply crossed over once, without the characteristic knot of the pretzel. Then through one of the comments on this post I found a lovely website with video demonstrations on shaping. The original link in German is here, and a translated one is here. While I have yet to master one of the different toss and fling techniques demonstrated, the videos showed me what I should aim for. I hope one day to be able to replicate the elegant moves and beautiful bretzel shapes.

Ingredients
Then came the question of ingredients. I first wanted to try a Sherry Yard recipe, but found it a little complicated (dark ale and buttermilk, for instance, and egg glaze, if my memory serves). I decided to try one of the recipes posted on the German site mentioned above (the one with the videos). It's simple, the dough is easy to make, and it rolls out quite easily. They taste good and pretty authentic to my non-expert palate.

Why?
One final word before I give you the recipe. Why would I choose to make these myself when I can buy delicious fresh pretzels here in Switzerland? To begin with, I don't have a pretzel stand literally near my home, and also they're quite expensive (think three children who do not want to share a pretzel among them.) But most of all... they're fun to make!

Recipe: Pretzels
Adapted from a recipe for "Laugenbrezel"

Ingredients

Pretzels
- 500g all-purpose flour.
(type 450 or 550 in Germany, ie type 45 or 55 in France.)
- 2 teaspoons salt (10g)
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1/4 liter (250g) lukewarm water
- 1 cube fresh yeast (42g).
This I believe is equivalent to 14g instant yeast. I was suprised by this quantity, but the pretzels didn't taste too yeasty.
- 40g margarine (hunh?) or butter (definitely butter!)
- Coarse salt for sprinkling

Dipping solution
- 100g baking soda
- 1 liter (1000g) water
This is a lot of baking soda. You can probably get away with less, though I really like the tangy flavor the soda gives the pretzel's crust. I keep the dipping solution for a while in the fridge for the next time I make pretzels, but I don't know if I can recommend that or not.

Preparation
Dissolve yeast in water. Mix flour and salt. Form a well, add the sugar and the yeast + water. Let it rest for 15 minutes before mixing.

Add the soft butter and knead everything to a smooth dough (I kneaded for 5 or 6 minutes on 2 in my Kitchenaid). Let the dough rest for 30 minutes.

From this dough you can make about 12 pretzels. Cut the dough into twelve equal parts, then roll each piece on the table (unfloured in my case, and I even had to dampen the table a little to generate some friction) to about 50 cm (20 inches?), tapered toward the ends. Don't make it smaller than 50cm, as it's impossible to get a good shape with a short, thick rope of dough. The dough should not get too warm or "locker" (loose? slack?) as you roll it out, or it might tear. (I didn't have any problem with this though, even after my kids' hot hands worked way longer than necessary on the dough ropes.)

Place the pretzels without covering them in the fridge for about an hour. This helps build a skin that will absorb the dipping solution better and make a beautiful shiny crust.

Preheat the oven to 200°C (390°F)

Dipping the pretzels: (this is where I didn't follow the original recipe with its lye solution...) Add the baking soda to the water, and bring to a boil. Then dip each pretzel for 10 seconds into the simmering solution, and place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. (I would recommend dipping for no longer than 10 seconds. I left some in longer, and believe this caused them to develop too many cracks).

You're supposed to score the dough once like for a baguette with a razor blade or sharp knife. I tried with a knife on one or two without much success, so my pretzles cracked in random places.

Sprinkle with salt. (Notice you don't need to brush the pretzels with egg wash or anything).

Bake the pretzels at 200°C (390°F) for about 15 to 20 minutes, depending on how dark you like them.



I let the girls have fun with shaping. I probably let the heart simmer for too long in the baking soda solution, as it has too many cracks. At least I assume that's what the problem was.

Croissants, Recap of Trials and Tribulations

*See April 2008 update below

Oh good, I overcame the fear of croissants induced by my last failure, and made this pretty batch.

I used Pierre Hermé's recipe, but increased the water significantly. His recipe specifies 200g (even suggests you start with only two thirds of this amount), whereas I believe I used 320g this time.

Perhaps it was a little too much water. I think the texture of the croissants could still be a little improved*(See the update below). The first time I made this recipe the croissants seemed more flaky, with large crunchy flakes just peeling off the tops, whereas this time they didn't make as many and as large crumbs. Could too much water reduce the flakiness? There must be a reason why the recipe cautions you to start with less water and add more only if you need it.

Or maybe they didn't proof enough*(yes! see update below). I defrosted the frozen raw croissants overnight in the fridge, then left them at room temperature for three hours before baking. But it was chilly (what's with all the snow we've been having for Easter?) and they still seemed a little firm when I touched them before putting them in the oven.


The insides that came out as I pulled on one end are fluffy, but the outside should break into more crunchy flakes or large crumbs


Still, the croissants came out OK, break out the Champagne!

Some process photos and comments


I rolled out the butter between two sheets of plastic wrap, cutting and pasting in places so it would cover about two thirds of the rolled out dough. When the plastic stuck too tenaciously to the butter, I put the whole thing in the freezer for a minute, after which the plastic peeled off easily.


Folding the dough after placing the butter block. I sealed the edges carefully, but made sure there was no air trapped with the butter


Rolling out the dough to make the croissants seems impossible at first. It springs right back to a smaller size. I did my best, then covered it in plastic, folded it once (to fit in the fridge) and put it in the fridge for at least half an hour, if not more. After this long rest, it rolled out quite easily. I cut triangles 22cm tall and 12cm wide. 20 or 18cm tall would have been enough, but that was the width of my dough strip. Lift the dough off the table to make sure it is relaxed before you start cutting triangles. Otherwise these can shrink as the dough retracts. If they do, it's not really a problem, but the shape of the croissant might be a little off.


The second half of the dough is waiting to be rolled out. See -- if you can, given the lighting -- the butter layers. Each half gave about 9 or 10 croissants, plus small bits of dough for minis. I froze the croissants on a tray after shaping them, and once they were frozen placed them in a tupperware box. It's good to know I still have about 8 of these in the freezer!

*Update April 2008
I can't believe I'm still writing about croissants... Rather than create another post I'll just update this one. The 8 frozen croissants mentioned above turned out much better than the ones originally posted about here, because this time I remembered to proof them in the microwave oven, with a glass of boiling water to create humidity and warmth. If you make many croissants, you can use your oven to proof them, but make sure it is completely cool. If the temperature gets too high the butter will leak, make a mess, and the croissants won't be light and fluffy.

I was much happier with these. It's all in the proofing!


A well proofed-croissant. How do you know the croissant has risen enough? Touch it. It should feel spongy, not at all firm.



Proper proofing somehow made the croissant taste more buttery, though it was made from the same batch as previously



Stretchy insides (click to view larger image)





* * *

Summary of my croissants endeavours

I've written a total of four posts about croissants (yes...), so here's an overview:

- First attempt, recipe from Le Pétrin
This post provides the first recipe I used, a lot of process photos, and links to many other croissant resources.
- Second attempt. The recipe from Hermé is included in this post. This is my current favorite recipe, provided the water is increased.
- Third attempt, and total failure, still using recipe from Hermé.
This shows what happens when the dough is too dry (yuck)
- Fourth attempt, (this post) using recipe from Hermé.
Good croissants. Increasing the amount of water and improving proofing made a huge difference. Some process photos.

Happy Easter!

A good stay-at-home Easter weekend: lots of baking!

I couldn't resist acquiring yet more cookie cutouts, this time an Easter bunny and an egg, which I used with my usual brown sugar cookie recipe.

I had thoughts of decorating the cookies with the kids, using lots of garishly colored royal icing. I have the food coloring, the sparkly sugary nonpareils... They would have loved it. But I didn't have the energy to make this a family project. And I don't like to eat royal icing (except on Christmas gingerbread cookies... which I never get to post about as Christmas time is too busy).

So I used dark and white chocolate instead. I didn't temper the chocolate. I simply melted it directly in the microwave in one of these squeeze bottles that I bought in case I might one day want to decorate a plated dessert with artful swishes of raspberry coulis or chocolate sauce. The chocolate hardened nicely, and while it isn't particularly shiny it was firm enough to withstand being wrapped up in a cellophane bag as a small gift.



I also made brioche, this time from Sherry Yard's Secrets of Baking. I just love brioche, and find it quite easy to make, provided you have a stand mixer.



Last night I also made (and froze before baking) croissants, for brunch guests tomorrow morning. I'm crossing my fingers these come out better than the last batch...

Oh and I nearly forgot: on Friday I made my first attempt at soft pretzels. I'll be experimenting more with these, the shaping alone is lots of fun.

Pain à l'ancienne

Until recently I was not a bread baker. But this is changing, and I've been making bread quite regularly these last few months. My cousin gave me The Bread-Maker's Apprentice (among other wonderful cookbooks, thanks so much!), and it was worth her purchasing it and schlepping it to Europe for this bread recipe alone.



A recipe worth the effort
We live in a country that makes good bread, no doubt about it. But we sometimes miss French white bread. Now this recipe doesn't make fluffy, light baguettes. It's flatter, and a little heartier. But the crust is just right, crackling without being too hard, and the flavor of the bread (especially with butter) is excellent. And when the kids specifically ask for "Mommy's bread," I can't help but think the effort is worth it.




Cold fermentation releases flavors
The secret to the flavor of this bread apparently lies in its long, cold fermentation, which releases flavors trapped in the flour... Reinhart explains this process at length and with great enthusiasm in his book, but I'll keep this post as brief as possible. It's good, that's all I can say. And once you get the hang of it, this bread is easy to make. You have to plan ahead, yes, but the actual handling time is brief.



Bake for the whole week
I always make two batches, to justify turning on the oven so hot for so long. I don't double the recipe as my KitchenAid wouldn't be able to handle it, but making a second batch of dough takes an extra ten minutes, max. This bread gets stale fairly quickly, so once it's baked and cooled, I freeze most of the bread and defrost later by placing it in the microwave on medium for 40 seconds, then putting it in the oven at 150°C for about five minutes.



Recipe: Pain à l'ancienne
Adapted from The Bread-Maker's Apprentice

[I'm being a little lazy and not referring to the book for instructions, as I've made this recipe so many times I have it memorized. Also I've modified the quantities so that one batch makes four breads that can all fit at the same time in my oven. If you feel the explanations aren't clear enough, let me know. Otherwise these sites seem to have posted the exact recipe. For good process photos see my friend Tanya's post.]

Ingredients
- 500g bread flour*
- 10.5 to 11g salt
- 10.5g fresh yeast** (or 3.5g instant yeast I believe)
- 360g ice cold water (under 4°C), more or less
- flour for shaping the dough the next day (about 1/2 cup)

Special equipment
The following make my life a lot easier with this recipe:
- Stand mixer: the dough is very sticky, so hand-kneading would not be fun
- Plastic scraper: you can use a silicone spatula
- Bench scraper: you can use the largest knife you have
- Pizza peel: not essential but so comfortable to slip the bread into the oven. Replace with the back of a cookie sheet
- Ceramic pizza stone, or quarry tiles. If you don't have one, you can perhaps layer several cookie sheets on top of each other and preheat them well.
- Spray bottle for squirting water: the kind you use for plants

The day before
- Prepare your ice water. I place water from the fridge in the freezer for about 15 minutes, but you can also add ice cubes.
- Prepare a large mixing bowl by oiling it lightly.
- Place flour in bowl of stand mixer. Bury the salt under the flour so it doesn't come in contact with the yeast. Break up the fresh yeast over the flour. Pour the cold water on top.
- Mix the dough with the dough hook at speed 1 until all the flour is absorbed by the water, then mix at speed 2 for 5 to 6 minutes. The dough should be quite wet: it should clear the sides of the bowl, but stick to the bottom (so a small circle of dough stays permanently glued to the bottom of the bowl as the dough hook swings the rest of the dough around the bowl). Add water drop by drop if it seems too dry, or a little flour at a time if it's too wet.
- As soon as you are done kneading, take a wet plastic scraper and scrape the dough into the oiled bowl. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

The next day

1. Shaping the breads
- Take the dough out of the fridge. It may or may not have risen in the fridge. Let it come to room temperature for at least two hours, possibly more if after the two hours it still hasn't at least doubled in size. I've let it sit on the counter for I believe up to four hours or more.


The dough after it has fully risen. I always work with two batches at a time.

- About 45 minutes to an hour before you want to bake your bread, start preheating your oven to its maximum temperature, preferably with a ceramic pizza stone (or quarry tiles?) placed in the lower half of the oven. The stone conducts heat efficiently and creates a nice crust. If you don't have a pizza stone, use the thickest cookie sheet you can find, or several cookie sheets. Perhaps they don't need to be preheated quite as long.
- About 10 minutes before baking, place a large metal pan in the top of the oven to heat it up. This will be used later for creating steam. Also start boiling the of cup of water that will later be poured into this pan.
- Prepare: flour, a bowl of cold water, a bench scraper, a plastic scraper, a piece of parchment paper on the back of a cookie sheet, or on a pizza peel if you have one.
- Liberally flour a work surface (about 1/2 cup of flour?)
- Very gently pour the dough out of the bowl, helping it along with the wet plastic scraper so as to prevent stretching as much as possible: you don't want to degas the dough and risk losing the precious air bubbles.
- Sprinkle flour generously all over the dough, and with floured fingers, gently lift the dough around the edges to add more flour and to gently shape it into a rectangle.
- Dip your bench scraper in the water bowl, and cut the rectangle into the first of four slices. You want to press down and pinch with the scraper, as opposed to making a sawing motion. After each slice, dry and flour your hands, then carefully lift the strip of dough with two hands onto the parchment paper, where you will gently stretch the dough to the width of the paper, as you lay it down. This should be fairly easy to do, I find gravity does all the work for me. But if the dough is very springy and resists being stretched, let it rest for five minutes to give the gluten a chance to relax. Repeat with all four slices of dough, making sure they don't touch each other.
- A light touch with the dough is essential to keeping if from deflating. Make sure your fingers are always either wet or floured to prevent the dough from sticking to them.
- Scoring dough that is this wet is not easy. I don't know the first thing about scoring, but scissors dipped in flour work fairly well. The recipe says you can skip scoring altogether if the dough doesn't cooperate.
- You don't have to wait for the baguettes to proof, you can proceed with the baking step right away.

2. Baking the breads
The first few minutes of baking are a little hectic. The goal is to create as much steam as possible in the beginning, as this helps the bread rise and creates a pleasant crust. Since most of us don't have professional ovens, Reinhart proposes workarounds (I think he calls this hearth baking):
- After putting the bread in the oven (just slide the bread together with the parchment paper onto the preheated stone or cookie sheet), immediately and carefully pour 1 cup of boiling water into the metal pan that has been heating at the top of your oven. (In the beginning I used a large Pyrex dish, which was great, till I poured water that wasn't quite hot enough into it, and it shattered over my precious bread.) Close the oven.
- 30 seconds later, open the door and quickly squirt water onto the sides of the oven with the squirt bottle. Work as quickly as possible, and try not to squirt water on the bread or on glass (lights, the door of your oven) or the thermal shock could cause cracking. Close the door of the oven, wait 30 seconds, do it again. You'll squirt the walls of your oven a total of 3 times in this way.
- (In the interest of full disclosure, let me say I use yet another steam gadget, though I have no idea if it contributes in any way to the success of my breads: I discovered my oven has a little doo-hicky that lets you squirt water inside to create steam. It may be superstition on my part, but I do my utmost to generate as much steam as possible as soon as I put the bread in the oven).
- After the final squirting, you can lower the oven temperature to 245°C. The temperature was higher in the beginning to compensate for all the door opening.
- After about 8 minutes, check to see if the bread is browning evenly. Turn it around to ensure even baking. Take out the steam pan if it still contains water, as now you want a dry environment for the bread.
- I take my bread out 10 minutes later. The target internal temperature is 96°C (205°F). One blogger suggested leaving it longer makes for a tougher crust. I often go by the color of the bread.
- Let the bread cool on a rack for 15-20 minutes. This is the hardest part, but worth it, as the texture of the bread won't be settled if you break in too soon.


This is rustic bread, uneven shaping and scoring really don't matter.



* A word about flour
Every country has different flour. Even within Western Europe, flour is different in France, Switzerland, Germany... The recipe came from an American book, that specified bread flour, which I cannot get here. My friend Tanya has done a lot of research on flour substitutions, so I will keep this brief.

Let's just say I tried many different flours and flour combinations: French T65, Halbweissmehl, Weissmehl, I even carted a huge bag of bread flour from the US (to see what I should be aiming for) as well as some vital wheat gluten to add to white flour to strengthen it.

Though I always try two different flours or flour combinations at the same time, I do not have the discipline for a truly scientific approach: I always forget which batch is which, or else I hate to break into two breads at the same time so I can't really compare them... After all these tests and trials, I would say I have a slight preference for baking with organic French T65 flour, which perhaps gives the best flavor, and it may be worthwhile to add a little vital wheat gluten to make it stronger (this seems to make bread that is a little less flat, but some say it also makes the bread too chewy or rubbery...) Really, any kind of white (not bleached though) all-purpose or bread flour works.

One thing I don't recommend, is adding whole-wheat flour. I tried that too, as little as 10%, but it just doesn't go with this kind of bread. Or so the lovers of white baguettes in this family believe.




I believe when I took these side-by-side pictures, my intention was to show the difference between two flours. Alas, I can't remember which was which. I'm pretty certain though that for the bottom photo, the left-hand bread used American bread flour and the right-hand bread used French T65. I think the bread flour gave more rise, but was slightly more chewy, whereas the French flour had better flavor. But don't hold me to it, I am no Cook's Illustrated!

** A word about yeast
Use instant yeast or fresh yeast, not dry active yeast, which needs to be soaked first. My flattest breads came from using the wrong kind of yeast (or from rough handling of the dough). Of course in Europe the yeast is called differently, so if you have a doubt, I believe instant is the very fine powdered yeast, and active dry yeast is the kind that comes in bigger granules. Fresh yeast comes in a cubic package -- at least here it does -- and must be kept in the fridge, for a maximum of two weeks.

Practice Makes Less than Perfect

I cannot keep this to myself any longer. My croissants were total beginner's luck. Batch 1 was a decent first attempt, batch 2 was pretty darn good, but batch 3 was... this:




Hard, dense, dry croissants

I can't help thinking there must be a mistake in the quantity of water specified by Herme's recipe (there are quite a few typos in this book, which I otherwise love): with a dry dough, the butter pierces through and you lose the flaky layers. I will update this post if I ever work up the courage to try again.

Update March 2008: Fewh, the last attempt was more successful.

Another shocking case of beginner's luck was my first attempts as macarons. Yes, macarons. A few years late, I am finally bitten by the bug. And what a bug it is. I'll expand some more on the theme in another post, this here post is about foolish pride and lessons in humility.

My first and second attempts at macarons turned out surprisingly well.


First try: coffee macarons, Hermé's recipe. Not perfect, but not bad


Second try: coffee and chocolate macarons. I thought I had them all figured out...

All of a sudden I was picturing myself churning out multiple batches of many-flavored macarons, and lecturing the blogging world about how I choose to avoid using food coloring. I then made batch after batch of duds (macarons lovers beware, the following pictures may upset you):


Third try: sure there's "feet" (the lacy stuff around the edges), but they shouldn't be spreading out all over the place


And here I thought I had found clever ways to color macarons naturally... Into the garbage with all of them



Oh the horror of prying these limp, fragile shells off the baking paper


Cookies shaped like baseball caps, anyone?


Small consolation: at least these came off the paper fairly easily


With their rims snipped off


The prettiest of this crop: of course these silly-looking macarons are edible, but that's not good enough

Well, so that's off my chest. I was a little demoralized to see my baking going downhill rather than progressing. Of course, I have a couple good photos up my sleeve still, or I would be too depressed to post tonight. But I have to say, my confidence is a little shaken.

* * *

Update: Summary of my croissants endeavours

I've written a total of four posts about croissants (yes...), so here's an overview:

- First attempt, recipe from Le Pétrin
This post provides the first recipe I used, a lot of process photos, and links to many other croissant resources.
- Second attempt. The recipe from Hermé is included in this post. This is my current favorite recipe, provided the water is increased.
- Third attempt (this post), and total failure, still using recipe from Hermé. This shows what happens when the dough is too dry (yuck)
- Fourth attempt, using recipe from Hermé.
Good croissants. Increasing the amount of water and improving proofing made a huge difference. Some process photos.

Croissants, Take Two

Of the pastries on this blog, one of the most challenging yet enjoyable to make was croissants. These involved a long and arduous process, but I was pleased with the results.

I wasn't however planning to make them very often. Yes they're good, but really, so much work. But when I asked my husband what he most wanted me to bake, his answer was immediate: croissants. He is a real Frenchman after all, and we live in a country whose Gipfeli, a pale cousin of the buttery croissant, only make us homesick for the boulangeries of Paris.

So I decided to try making them again, this time using -- can you stand another mention of his name? -- a Pierre Hermé recipe. Does the food blogging world need another Hermé recipe? Actually, yes. These came out really, really, well. Crunchy, flaky, tender, buttery, stretchy ropy insides that unravel when you give them a gentle tug... Results matter more to me than originality, and therefore, without further apology, I give you my latest source of baking satisfaction, Hermé's recipe for croissants.


Recipe: Croissants
Source: Pierre Hermé, Secrets Gourmands

For 24 croissants
[I think I only managed to make 18]

Ingredients
- 600g flour (type 45, which is fairly low in gluten)
- 35g very soft butter
- 325g cold butter
- 12g fresh yeast
[You can certainly substitute instant dry yeast, I believe that would make 4g instant dry yeast? Check other sources for conversions to make sure]
- 15g whole milk powder
[I only found low fat milk powder]
- 280-300g cold water (20°C ie room temperature)
[Update March 28: Hermé specifies 200g, and recommends starting with two thirds the amount of water, adding the rest later only if you need it. For the croissants photographed here, I increased the water until the dough looked "right," which turned out well. The next time though I thought I should follow the recipe more closely and I tried 240g water: the dough was too dry, provoking a disaster. Photos of the duds posted here. I then tried 320g and had better results. This may have been a little too much water though, see comments in that post. So somewhere between 280g and 300g?]
- 75g sugar
[I plan to try with a little less next time]
- 12g salt
[Hermé specifies "fleur de sel," but I used regular salt]

Egg wash
- 2 eggs
- 1 egg yolk
- a pinch of salt
[Now I'm not about to sacrifice 3 eggs for egg wash: I used one egg and poured out some of the egg white to increase the yolk-to-egg-whites ratio]

Sift the flour in a bowl: add the salt, the sugar, the milk powder, the soft butter and the yeast diluted in two thirds of the water. Work the dough only until all the ingredients are combined, no more [to avoid developing the gluten in the flour]. Add the remaining water if the dough seems too firm.

[I ended up adding quite a bit more water I believe, which made me worried as I ended up having to work the dough a lot more to absorb all the water. But all turned out OK. Still, I think it's normal if this dough seems a little dry and rough, so next time I'll try to take it easy on the water]

Cover the recipient with film wrap and let the dough rise for 1 to 1 1/2 hours, depending on the temperature of the room (Ideally room should be at 22°C). The dough should double in size.

[Mine didn't, but I didn't have time to wait so went on with the next step, already feeling gloomy that with the water issue and the lack of rise my croissants were off to a dismal start.]

Punch down the dough by removing it from the bowl, pushing down on it with your fist to give it its initial size and put it back in the bowl. Cover with film wrap and store in refrigerator (4°C) for one hour to 1 hour and 15 minutes. Punch it down once more.

At this point you can either continue with the recipe or store the dough in the refrigerator for the next day. In either case, first chill the dough in the freezer for 30 minutes.

[Allow me digress on a pet peeve: how I wish French cookbooks provided more explanations on why they make us perform certain operations. Why do I have to chill my dough in the freezer before chilling it in the fridge? It drives me crazy not to understand why I do things. End of rant]

When you're ready to continue with the recipe, work the cold butter with a spoon or stand mixer to make it more supple.

[I actually banged the butter between two sheets of plastic film and then rolled it roughly to the size of the dough it's supposed to cover]

Roll the dough into a long rectangle, then spread half the butter on the lower two thirds of the rectangle and give it a simple turn with the butter then another simple turn without adding butter.

[About the turns: he's not specific here, so I looked at other recipes by Hermé and found he specified folding the bottom third (covered with butter) over the middle third (also covered with butter), then the top third (which has no butter on it) over the other two thirds. This, again, doesn't make sense to me. My instinct would be to fold the top over the middle so you immediately get two layers of butter. Or else why bother spread the butter over two thirds, why not over a single, bottom third? I'm sure I've lost my readers at this point, sorry. I followed his instructions without understanding why, and this still rankles. But again, results, results, are what matter...]

[So we have one simple (3-fold) turn with half the butter added, followed by one simple turn with no butter added. I think I popped the dough a few times in the fridge to rest and relax as rolling croissant dough is hard. You have to be really strong, yet not manhandle the dough too much for fear of the butter escaping... Flour your work surface regularly to make sure the dough doesn't stick. And use a brush to remove the flour when you fold the dough.]

Place the dough in the freezer for 30 minutes, then in the fridge for 1 hour, and repeat the turns first with the remaining butter, then with no added butter.

[So you should have made 4 single turns in all, one with added butter, one without, rest period, then one turn with rest of butter, and one turn with no added butter.]

The dough is now ready. Roll it to 2.5 millimeters thickness [ha! good luck trying! Actually, I kept popping the dough back in the fridge every so often to give it a chance to relax, which helped a little] and cut triangles 20cm tall and 12cm wide (thus about 60g per croissant). Roll the triangles from the base, curve them into croissant shape and place them on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper, leaving 5cm of space between them. Let them rise for 1 1/2 to 2 hours at room temperature.

[These shaping instructions are brief. May I suggest you look at my previous croissant post and particularly at the PBS video described in that post to find out more about shaping. One tip I would like to highlight here is to grasp the dough triangle firmly in one hand by the short side and pull the whole dough strip from top to bottom with your other hand. This stretching seems to help. Also cut a nick in the short side and really pull the ends out to make those pointy tips I love in croissants.]

Once the croissants have risen, brush them with egg wash and bake for 20 minutes in an oven which has been preheated to 220°C and lowered to 190°C immediately after putting the croissants in.

[The croissants may seem too dark to you at first but it's important to really bake them for that long. I underbaked the first batch and the insides were too heavy and wet. Also, try, really try, to let them cool for 10 minutes or more before digging in... ]


I want to improve my shaping skills to get tighter, pointier tips to my croissants. Those crunchy ends are my favorite part.

My husband's verdict on these was that they are better than any croissants you can get in Switzerland. Which if you ask me, is a somewhat of a back-handed compliment, but never mind, I'll keep honing my croissants skills to elicit even higher praise from him. As I progress I'll add more photos to this post, with more step-by-step process photos if readers request it.

* * *

Now, my biggest issue with croissants, as with bagels, is: how do I get them fresh for breakfast without getting up at 4 am?!!

* * *

Update: Summary of my croissants endeavours

I've written a total of four posts about croissants (yes...), so here's an overview:

- First attempt, recipe from Le Pétrin
This post provides the first recipe I used, a lot of process photos, and links to many other croissant resources
- Second attempt (this post), recipe from Hermé is included in this post. This is my current favorite recipe, provided the water is increased
- Third attempt, and total failure, still using recipe from Hermé.
This shows what happens when the dough is too dry (yuck)
- Fourth attempt, using recipe from Hermé
Good croissants. Increasing the amount of water and improving proofing made a huge difference. Some process photos.

"Inverse" Puff Pastry, or Pâte Feuilletée Inversée

Update October 2008: I just discovered I made a mistake in the recipe, and left out 200g of butter (recipe is now correct)! My heartfelt apologies to anyone who tried this recipe and failed, I hate it when a recipe is wrong...


I've definitely overcome my intimidation with regards to puff pastry. Having made this version a couple of times successfully, I then launched into Pierre Hermé's "inverse" puff pastry, or "pâte feuilletée inversée." I'm not sure what the major advantage of this over the traditional recipe is, but several sources claim it makes more delicate and even puffing dough.

Traditional puff pastry requires enclosing butter in a flour and water dough, then rolling and folding the package several times. Here it's the reverse: the butter encloses the flour and water dough. Sounds messy? It is. I'm not sure why the recipe doesn't mention how to handle this stickiness but somehow I managed, and the result was really very flaky and good.

Below is the recipe for this particular type of puff pastry, followed by some of the items I made from it over the last few months.


Recipe: Pâte Feuilletée Inversée (Inverse puff pastry)
Source: Pierre Hermé, Secrets Gourmands

Ingredients

For the butter block
- 375g soft butter
- 150g flour

For the "détrempe"
- 350g flour
- 15g salt
- 110g melted butter
- 1.5 dl water (150g)
(Do not use all the water at once, depending on the humidity of your flour; if the détrempe is too hard, you'll have trouble rolling the dough, if it's too wet the dough won't rise properly...)
- 1/2 tspn white vinegar

Preparing the butter block

Mix the flour and the butter until the dough forms a ball, then flatten it in a disk that is 2 cm thick, wrap in film and store for 1 1/2 hour in the fridge, at 4°C.

Preparing the détrempe

Mix all the ingredients (careful with the water). When the dough is homogenous, flatten it in a square that is 2cm thick; wrap in film and reserve for 1 1/2 hours in the fridge, 4°C.

Making the "turns"

When the two doughs have rested, remove from fridge, flatten the butter block in a 1 cm thick disk. Place the détrempe in the center and fold the arcs of the butter disk over the détrempe, sealing it fully. Start flattening this square by banging all over its surface with your fist or rolling pin. Then, use the rolling pin and starting from the center, roll genly towards the borders to form a rectangle three times as long as it is wide.

Give it a double turn (fold in four, each side folded to the middle then the whole thing folded like a book... if you need more explanations let me know, but there are lots of illustrations on the web). Turn the rectangle so the fold is on your left, press down gently and wrap in film. Place for one hour in fridge.

Then flatten the dough with your fist or rolling pin, then roll gently again into a rectangle that is three times as long as it is wide. Give it a double turn, flatten slightly, wrap and store in fridge for at least one hour (dough can stay overnight or for up to two days in fridge at this point).

The last turn is a "simple" turn, and is given shortly before you use the dough. Again roll the dough into a long rectangle, and this time fold it in three, like a letter. Wrap and let it rest for half an hour in the fridge.

When you roll it at this point you can lightly flour your work surface, but Hermé says it is better not to use flour when you're giving the dough its "turns." Which is tricky since it's the butter that's in contact with the work surface in the beginning. What helps is to keep the dough very cold at all times, and to roll between sheets of parchment paper or cling film.


Here you see how messy the beginning was. I relied on the parchment paper to keep the dough from sticking to my work surface.


The first rolled out rectangle, with all the butter cracking along the edges


Double turn: Folding the dough towards its middle before folding the whole thing in half


By now the dough is more manageable (clearly I didn't heed the advice on not flouring the work surface while making the turns)


When I look at this photo it seems I gave the dough more turns than the recipe recommends. Indeed I seem to remember that for this first attempt at pâte feuilletée inversée, I followed the recipe from the Larousse du Chocolat (also by Hermé), which has ambiguous wording concerning the number of turns one should give. However it came out well, and the next attempt as well, even though this last one definitely had only two double and one single turns (therefore 4*4*3=48 layers, a lot less than my very first puff pastry which had 729 layers!). I'm a little puzzled that I would get similar results with such a different number of turns, but I guess puff pastry is less sensitive than one would think.


Pâte feuilletée caramélisée

(Update May 2008: I provide a more detailed explanation of how to make caramelized puff pastry in this post about millefeuilles.)

This is the building block for making mille-feuilles (in English often referred to as a Napoleons), which I've never made. But the caramelized puff pastry on its own makes a delicious snack.

As far as I remember, the dough is pricked all over with a fork, sprinkled with regular sugar, chilled, then baked for a few minutes before being weighed down and baked some more. Then it is turned over and sprinkled with confectioner's sugar and baked for a final 5 or 8 minutes.






For a mille-feuilles you would want to weigh down the dough more to keep it flatter. After all that work building layers, yes, you do want to inhibit the dough's expansion. I couldn't bring myself to do it, hence the rather thick wedges of dough.


Fig and goat cheese tartlets



Recipe: Fig and goat cheese tartlets
Source: from my friend Patrice (adapted somewhat)

Take some mild, fresh goat cheese and mix it with thyme and rosemary, salt, pepper and a little cayenne pepper. Spread some on some puff pastry, add figs, add fresh rosemary, and bake at 200°C for 20 minutes.


Galette des rois





For the recipe of this galette, see here.

* * *

Recap of all puff pastry-related recipes on this blog (as of January 2008):

Puff Pastry recipes
- Traditional pâte feuilletée
- Pâte feuilletée inversée (This post)

Recipes that use puff pastry
- Galette des rois or Pithiviers first post
- Galette des rois second post and third post (This post)
- Palmiers (particularly good for using up the precious scraps of dough)
- Cheese straws or puffs (also good for scraps of dough)
- Caramelized puff pastry (This post)
- Fig and goat cheese tartlets (This post)

My Best Chocolate Dessert

I realize I'm beginning to feel more confident in pâtisserie when I start changing recipes, or using building blocks to create a different result. My favorite dessert of the moment started with Pierre Hermé's Dôme de mousse au chocolat.


The dome freshly unmolded from its (Ikea) bowl, then covered in cocoa and decorated with sloppy chocolate ruffles and a chocolate cookie on top. All photos here were taken on the fly, no time for styling!

The dome has two layers of syrup-soaked chocolate cake layer nestled in a chocolate mousse (mousse sabayon, no gelatin) with caramelized nuts sprinkled in. I first made it exactly according to Hermé's recipe, in a dome form, though I didn't cover the cake with chocolate icing. I found a simple dusting of cocoa was sufficient.

Unfortunately I served the cake still semi-frozen, so the texture inside is not as airy as it should be. And in case you're wondering, I cut out the back of a cereal box to serve as a cardboard round underneath the cake. I'll be buying some prettier rounds next time I go to Mora!




This dome can make a spectacular presentation, especially if one has a little more time than I did to decorate it nicely. But the big slices weren't that pretty, the left-over partial dome looked sad in the fridge, and I felt it needed a different texture to complement the mousse and cake.

So I decided to form individual portions using dessert rings. I then replaced the bottom layer with dacquoise. So now we have, from the top down:
- Cocoa dusted on top, with something to decorate: a caramelized nut, a chocolate fan...
- Chocolate sabayon mousse
- Chopped caramelized almonds (should have been hazelnuts but I prefer almonds)
- Chocolate génoise-like layer moistened with cocoa-flavored syrup
- Chocolate sabayon mousse
- Caramelized nuts
- Almond dacquoise


This photo shows the different layers, though I prefer to hide them in the mousse




Yes, this dessert takes a long time to make. I make it over several days. The dacquoise keeps a long time, and I have circles of cake layer in my freezer as we speak, awaiting the next batch.

But what makes it all worthwhile is I can freeze the finished desserts, and defrost them over the course of a dinner. So when impromptu guests come by, I can whip out a stunning dessert in no time.

Well that's the theory. Unfortunately, my husband and I usually polish these off before anyone can suprise us with a visit.


Sprinkle the cocoa at the last minute, or it will start looking wet on the edges as in these photos. I tried to improvise some chocolate ruffles, and my hurry shows. But no matter how misshapen, these fans can always serve as a decoration.


A simple caramelized almond also serves as decoration. I'd also like to try the more elaborate caramelized hazelnuts shown here.


Recipe: Chocolate Mousse Cake with Caramelized Almonds
Source: Adapted from Pierre Hermé, Secrets Gourmands (Yikes, out of print? I bought it last summer, and for a fifth of the price listed here... It's a small hardcover book with gorgeous photos, but too many mistakes and typos. In any case, the following recipes can also be found in the Larousse du Chocolat).

For the syrup
This step is easy, so make it ahead to get it out of the way.
- 100ml water
- 50g sugar
- 15g unsweetened cocoa
Mix sugar and cocoa in a small pot. Add water, and bring to a boil while whisking. Leave to cool.

For the cake layer ("biscuit au cacao")
Can be made ahead. Store in the fridge tightly-wrapped for 2 or 3 days, or freeze.
- 100g egg yolks (5-6 egg yolks)
- 100g egg whites (3 egg whites)
- 20g flour
- 20g "fécule" (I used corn starch, but I think fécule is potato starch)
- 20g unsweetened cocoa
- 45g melted butter
- 100g sugar
Preheat oven to 230°C.
Sift flour, corn or potato starch, and cocoa. Whip egg whites with half the sugar. In another bowl, whisk egg yolks with the rest of the sugar till they become white and fluffy. Add 2 TB of this egg yolk mixture to the melted butter. Fold the whites into the yolks, then very delicately add the flour mixture, and finally the melted butter mixture.
Spread the batter evenly on a baking paper-lined cookie sheet, about 1 cm thick. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes. The cake should be barely cooked through. Let cool. Cut out circle shapes using a dessert ring as a cookie cutter. Store tightly covered. You can freeze them at this point.

For the dacquoise layer
Can be made several days ahead.
See this post for more details
- 135 g ground hazelnuts or almonds
- 150 g icing sugar
- 5 egg whites (save the yolks for the mousse, below)
- 50 g sugar
Preheat oven temperature to 170°C.
Sift together the ground nuts and icing sugar. If this is difficult to do, grind whatever doesn't make its way through the sieve. See post linked above for more details.
Whip the egg whites until firm, gradually add the regular sugar as you go. Using a flexible spatula, delicately incorporate the nut and icing sugar mixture.
On a cookie sheet that has been covered with parchment paper, spread the batter to about 1 cm thickness. Bake for 35 minutes.
Let cool, and cut out circle shapes using a dessert ring as a cookie cutter. Store tightly covered.
You can freeze them at this point as well, if possible in a rigid container to prevent breakage.

For the mousse ("mousse sabayon")
The mousse must be used as soon as it is made, so prepare it only when you are ready to assemble the cakes.
- 300g 70% dark chocolate (Hermé recommends Valrohna Guanaja)
- 1/2 liter of whipping cream
- 2 eggs
- 5 egg yolks
(so you need 7 eggs total, of which you do not use 5 egg whites.)
- 140g sugar
Melt the chocolate in small pieces in a water bath or in the microwave oven. Let it cool to 45°C. Put the sugar in a pot with 3 TB of water, let boil for more or less 3 minutes, or until the surface is covered in large bubbles (125°C)
[Astrid's note: I use a thermometer, and pull the syrup off the heat when it reaches 120°C, see below why].
Put the whole eggs and the yolks in a bowl and whip them while slowly drizzling on them the hot syrup.
[Note: this is where I've had problems in the past: the syrup sometimes hardened into a ball that almost prevented my hand-held mixer whisks from turning. I fished out the ball, threw it out and made some more syrup. My tips: make sure you don't pour the syrup on the whisks themselves, but rather in the egg directly, and perhaps undercook the syrup slightly.]
Place a large bowl in the freezer for 10-15 minutes. Use it to whip the cream. Add one quarter of the cream to the chocolate, then all the rest of the cream, and finally the egg-syrup mixture, folding gently with a whisk.
[Note: definitely use a whisk, not a spatula. I've had some problems with the chocolate hardening into little flakes on contact with the cream. Do make sure it is 45°C when you mix it with the cream. And anyway, if you eat the mousse with the caramelized nuts and the cake layers, you won't notice the chocolate flakes.]

For the caramelized almonds
These can be made several days in advance if you store them air-tight.
(I halved the recipe)
- 200g hazelnuts or almonds
- 125g sugar
- 35 ml water
- 1/4 vanilla pod (seeds scraped out)
Roast nuts in 170°C oven for 12-15 minutes
[Note: for the almonds I find this is too long, I roast mine about 7 minutes as they continue to roast in the hot caramel. Perhaps however for the hazelnuts you need 12 minutes to help get their skins off].
Boil sugar and water and vanilla pod and vanilla seeds in a large pot. When mixture is 118-120°C, throw in the warm nuts, remove pot from the heat and mix vigorously until sugar crystallizes around the nuts. Return the pan to heat and keep stirring until the sugar turns amber and there is almost no trace of crystallized sugar left on the nuts (I always have a little left, as I'm afraid of burning the caramel). Pour contents of pan on a silicone mat (or baking paper?) and gently separate nuts. Leave to cool and harden.

Assembly
This is how I assemble my cakes, but there may be other methods. I usually build them upside down, then turn them over when I unmold them.
1. Prepare the rings
I use a small cookie sheet that fits into my freezer, and line it with baking paper. I place the rings on the sheet, and line each with special plastic called rhodoid or papier guitare, I forget which. Is it acetate in English? This makes unmolding easier, but is not required.
2. Fill the rings, assembly line-style
I spread a thin layer of mousse (using a pastry bag is helpful but not required). I sprinkle it with chopped caramelized nuts, then cover with a disk of chocolate cake brushed with syrup. More mousse, more nuts, and then finish with a disk of dacquoise.
3. Freeze for a few hours or overnight (or as long as you can resist the temptation...)
4. Unmold the cakes onto serving plates, turning them upside down so the dacquoise is on the bottom. Remove the rhodoid before the cake thaws; this will give you crisp edges. If you didn't use rhodoid, then warm the ring with a hairdryer and gently push on the dacquoise to extract the cake from the ring. Place in the refrigerator for a little while to thaw cake.
5. Decorate
Remove from fridge 15 minutes before serving to take off the chill, and at the last moment dust with unsweetened cocoa and decorate with chocolate ruffles or a caramelized nut.

Fewh! Hopefully you've made about 12 of these and have enough in the freezer to last you for another meal at least. Then I just might suprise you with an impromptu visit...

Variation: Making a dome
If you want to make the dome rather than the individual portions, use a bowl with a 20cm diameter. Cut out cake or dacquoise disks that are 14cm and 18cm in diameter. The smaller one goes in after you've filled the first half of the bowl with mousse, then comes more mousse, then the larger disk.
If your bowl size is different, then adjust the sizes of the disks, but you don't need to do a lot of math, you can eyeball the size of disks you need. If the disks are a little too small, they'll just be buried in the mousse.
To unmold, Hermé says to immerse the bowl for 10 seconds in lukewarm water. I used boiling water, and it took more than 10 seconds, but then the surface of the dome wasn't very smooth. Also my pretty Ikea bowl has no lip for my fingers to hold onto, which made it a little hard to handle.

And with the left-overs?
I never have enough rings, so I simply layer the mousse and cake into individual bowls, and serve directly in the bowl without unmolding. This informal presentation tastes just as good, and gives all the more reason to enjoy these "en famille"!

Brioche

My best "brioches à tête" so far, though shape can still be improved


I love the braided look of this loaf

Yay, I am finally the proud owner of a Kitchen Aid mixer (thank you dear husband)! And what better way to use the mixer than to make brioche. I could never have made these by hand, the dough is way too sticky.

I am very happy with my first attempts.

Rich man's or middle-class brioche?

I started with an Hermé recipe (who else), though I was horrified by the quantity of butter: 400g for 500g flour. They were delicious though. Unfortunately I have no photo of the insides of these.


"Middle-class" brioche: fluffy, buttery insides, I think it's referred to as ropy, ("mie filante" in French)

Then I found another recipe with about half that amount of butter -- not exactly light either -- and the flavor was almost as good, the texture almost better (photo above). The large brioche had a lovely moist and airy crumb.


Dough after a 20-minute workout in my Kitchen Aid


Dough after three hours rising at room temperature (different lighting)

I've since discovered that I first made "rich man's brioche*" (80% butter to flour ratio), and then tried my hand at "middle class man's brioche" (50%). The poor man's brioche has about 20% butter to flour ratio, but I haven't made it yet. (Honestly, snobbery aside, why bother?)

(Update August 2008: I have since made and blogged about pains au lait, shown here to the right, which has 25% butter, and could certainly qualify as a poor man's brioche. They look pretty, they're a good snack for kids, but for my taste they're too decadent for bread, and not decadent enough for brioche!)



Loaf in the back, simple brioches with no heads in front


Shaping the brioches

It's so much fun to make the loaf: just place six balls of 95g of dough each, "en quinconce" as they say in French (in staggered rows says the dictionary). Then as they swell into each other they form a nice braid effect.


Trial number 2 of "brioches à tête"

But what I've really been longing to reproduce are the "brioches à tête," also known as "brioches parisiennes." These are the ones I grew up with, and there is no equivalent here in Switzerland. No, not even Sprüngli's will do. However I still have to work a lot on my shaping technique.

For batch one the heads were too big and slipped off (no photo), and for batch two (photo above) the dough was too wet and the heads sort of melted into the bodies. Batch three was barely better, see the second photo in this post. For batch four I made large brioches, 500g and 300g I believe. These larger ones were easier to make and kept their heads better than the small ones. See topmost photo of this post.

Yes, I've already made four batches. In what, three weeks? Oh my. But I've had a lot of house guests lately. Good excuse for making brioches!


Brioches "sans têtes?" The shape may be boring...


But they're still verrrry tasty!

*These expressions are borrowed from my new cookbook, Peter Rheinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice (fondly referred to as BBA among bloggers, whose enthusiasm for this book was infectious). So I am indeed happy: a Kitchen Aid and a great new cookbook, whole new horizons to explore!


Recipe: Brioche
(Middle-class variety)
Source: not sure, off of a reader comment on a French discussion forum, and then I made some small changes based on other recipes I read and because the dough first seemed too wet.

Ingredients
- 500g flour (I used a combination of T45 - cake flour? - and Butterzopf flour, the closest to bread flour I could find here. I think all-purpose flour works fine.)
- 20g fresh yeast (you can replace it with something like 7g dry active yeast, but maybe check conversion rate on the internet)
- 6 eggs, or 5 very large ones (290g total)
- 250g butter, room temperature
- 10-11g salt (2 tspn?)
- 60-80g sugar, depending on how sweet you like it
- 60g milk

Mix yeast into milk, add some flour (3 TB?). Cover and let this rest for 15 minutes. (I think this is called a sponge, though most recipes with sponge would let this rest for more like 30 min.)

Sift flour, salt and sugar. Add about 3/4 of the eggs, mix, then the milk and yeast mixture. Mix in the rest of the eggs, then switch to the dough hook and mix for 10 minutes. It's supposed to detach from the sides of the bowl, but I always find it stays very sticky.

Add the butter, one TB at a time, waiting for it to be almost all mixed in before adding the next piece. Continue mixing till the dough detaches from the sides of the bowl (again, this did not seem very apparent to me.)

Butter a large bowl, place dough in it, cover, and let rise for 2 to 3 hours at room temperature. Then place in the fridge for a few hours (I often leave it overnight).

Shape the brioches: 6 balls of 95g each for the loaf above, 50g per small indidual brioche, between 250g and 500g for the larger brioches à têtes, depending on the size of your molds. For shaping balls, try to tuck the edges of the dough under the ball to create surface tension. But the dough is so buttery you have to work quickly so it doesn't warm up. If it is hard to handle, put it back in the fridge for further chilling.

Note: How to have brioches ready for breakfast
I sometimes freeze the shaped dough at this stage. Then if I want some for breakfast, I defrost them in the fridge overnight, get up at 5 am (yes, you read this correctly, but remember I have a handy baby to wake me up in the wee hours of the night, something every bread baker should have at home...) to take them out of the fridge, go back to bed if I can for 2 hours, then glaze and bake in time for breakfast.

I have yet to find a less painful way to have brioches for breakfast, but they're worth it. Still, on a side note, I am always on the lookout for recipes for yeasted breakfast goodies that don't require such brutally early awakenings... End of digression.

Let rise for one or two hours (dough seems very soft and giving if you touch it), and glaze with egg wash (a beaten egg with a pinch of salt), without letting too much egg wash stick to the molds, which might hinder rising.

Bake in preheated oven at 200°C for small brioches, 180°C for larger ones. The small ones bake in about 12 minutes, the larger ones between 25 to 35 minutes. You might want to cover the larger ones with tin foil if they get too dark (like one of my large brioches à tête did). Or perhaps try baking at lower temperatures, which I might try next. Cool on a rack.



And coming soon, a post about my first attempts at making "baguette à l'ancienne..."

Update: Hmm, not sure I'm ready to post about these baguettes. They're from the BBA, they're absolutely delicious, but my first two attempts came out really flat. I must figure out a solution before I can post about them, and I can't say I have any idea what to do about this.

Update, March 18: See my post about Pain à l'ancienne here.

Cannelés

I've been vacationing in the same place by the sea in Spain since I was a child. The friends I made there as a teenager keep coming back, and as we have produced on average three children each, the crowd has become too large to convene at each others' houses. So we have picnics in the evening on the beach, which is a lovely new tradition.

Cannelés
This year Isabelle brought miniature cannelés. These delicacies from Bordeaux are crunchy and caramelized on the outside, and tender and custardy on the inside. When I lived in New York I sometimes used to buy one larger one for $2 at Balthazar Bakery in Soho.

About the molds
I happen to have silicone molds for cannelés, which I've never used for their intended purpose. According to some sources, only copper molds can produce the desired result. But at about 11 euros per cup, even I can't justify investing in this kind of gadget. So silicone it is.
(Some bloggers have even successfully produced cannelé-like cakes without the special molds, either silicone or copper.)
And I didn't use any beeswax to butter my molds, which apparently increases the shine and overall attractiveness of the cake. I can't believe it's really necessary.



First results are very encouraging
I'm so glad Isabelle shared this recipe with me. They're very easy to make, if you have the patience to wait 24 hours. And even though the baking time is quite long, I'm sure my cost per cannelé is much less than $2, and the taste and texture are identical if not superior to what I tasted in New York or in Paris bakeries. I haven't had the real thing from Bordeaux but I'm willing to take bets my cannelés can stand the comparison. The one thing I might fiddle with next time is reducing the quantity of butter, as they seem very rich when they're still warm.

(Now I know my brother has a weak spot for cannelés, having once dated a woman from Bordeaux... maybe this post will tempt him to come visit again soon!)

Recipe: Cannelés

Source: my friend Isabelle from the beach...
Quantity: about 12 regular canneles
For 32 (two batches of 16), multiply quantities by 2.5

(Prepare the batter 24 hours before baking the cannelés)

Ingredients
- ½ liter milk
- 50g butter
(I might try with less butter next time)
- 100g flour
- 200g sugar
- 2 eggs + 2 egg yolks
- 1 TB rhum (optional, I didn't use any)
- 1 Tspn vanilla (I used a combination of vanilla extract and powdered vanilla bean, perhaps more than the suggested amount)

1. Boil the milk with the butter. (Some recipes say the milk should then be cool before mixing in with other ingredients. I didn't pay attention to its temperature)
2. Mix the flour and sugar
3. Beat the eggs and yolks and mix with flour-sugar mixture
4. Add the rhum (I didn't), then slowly whisk in the milk + butter mixture. The batter should be like a crèpe batter. If necessary, use a sieve to get rid of any lumps.
5. Add the vanilla.
6. Let the batter rest 24 hours in the fridge
7. Preheat the oven to 150°C (300°F). Fill cannelé molds with the batter, leaving almost no space at the top. If the molds are silicone, you probably don't need to butter them first. Definitely do butter them carefully if they are metal molds.
8. Place them in the oven, increase the temperature to 250°C (450°F) and bake for 15 minutes (the oven may get smoky during these first 15 minutes). Then lower the oven temperature to 180°C (355°F) and bake them for one hour if using miniature cannelé molds, 1 hour and 15 minutes for regular sized molds. They should be quite dark on the outside.
9. Unmold as soon as you take them out of the oven (or they will stick to the mold. If they do, pop them back in the oven for a few minutes), and let them cool off completely before serving (I personally don't like them warm at all, they're squishy inside...)

Update June 2008:
These freeze well: to thaw, nuke them in the microwave very briefly (about 20 seconds at fairly high power), and amazingly they come out crunchy. I've only tried this with one at a time though. Also, these make a nice gift package, see here.

* * *


(Coming next, Patrice's fig and goat cheese tart, also sampled at this picnic...)

The Bun Came Out of the Oven

This is why I'm not posting much these days! We're very happy to welcome our third daughter to our family. I should soon have a lot of helping hands around the kitchen! But if they prefer to play soccer with their father, that's fine with me too.