Patisserie 16: Rhubarb and Rose Buttercream Macarons

 Once I got back to my home kitchen, I was determined to prove that my improved macaronage and troubleshooting from previous macaron bakes were the culprits of my issues with this pastry. So I made a batch of macarons, intending to fill them with a rhubarb and ginger white chocolate ganache. 

Suffice to say, white chocolate behaves significantly differently than other types of chocolate, and my ganache was an utter failure. Basically, the lack of cacao content means that it sets softer and in general requires far less liquid to make a ganache; my resulting ganache, based on a recipe for dark chocolate, was way too liquid. But I baked up a batch of the macaron shells anyways, figuring I'd find some other type of filling for them the next day when I was less frustrated. 

Patisserie Intermission: Baking Abroad

 It's kind of odd that, despite a monthlong trip in Europe while unemployed sounds like a relaxing time, it was actually one of the least relaxing trips I've taken here. Herein lies the trap of letting your hobbies become your responsibilities: it will follow you home through the goodness of your heart wanting to help you improve. I got the itch to bake and write, and so, funded by my parents' desire to stop hearing me threaten to go home because I couldn't cook in their kitchen, I purchased a few bare bones pieces of equipment and was able to make some decent pastry explorations while there. 

In total, I bought: 

• A kitchen scale
• A rubber spatula
• A pastry brush
• A single silicone mold
• Food coloring
• A set of circle cutters
• A piping bag (13")
  
• A piping tip (round, 10mm)
• An offset spatula
  

And with those, I was able to make...

Patisserie 15: Orange marmalade and pastry cream macarons

 I had an abundance of oranges from my produce box that I wanted to use up before heading out for a month of travel coming up, so I decided to make marmalade, and what better use for a tiny batch of marmalade than as filling for another batch of macarons? 

I was also excited to try making macarons in my kitchen this time, without my friend's helpful guidance, to see if I had learned anything from our previous collaboration. 

I don't have a whole lot of photos from the marmalade process, because my focus on this journey is on the patisserie, but the basic gist is that I riffed on this recipe from David Lebovitz using five oranges and a lemon. Because I was going to be using the filling in macarons, I used a zester instead of cutting up the peel, so the resulting bits of marmalade would be smaller. 

Patisserie 14: Blood Orange and Rosemary Macarons

Macarons are a type of sandwich cookie that has exploded in popularity in recent years as a dainty snack. Laduree in Paris is largely credited with introducing the cookie to the public as the Parisian Macaron, where macaron previously referred to the unfilled, singular cookie halves. The cookie portions are meringue with almond flour, and the filling is typically a ganache, buttercream, or other semi-solid flavor component. The cookie is typically smooth on top, with a ruffled brim called the "foot", and flat on the bottom, and assembled macarons are aged for at least a day after filling to allow the cookie interior to moisten.

So, I've been dreading this section on macarons because their recent popularity has taken the form of the pastry down the same road as the croissant: held to a known standard that prioritizes hyperoptimization of certain features that the public has deemed "ideal". In the case of croissants, I am in major disagreement with several of the ideal features and thus unmotivated to pursue them as a pastry learning endeavor; in the case of macarons, I simply did not think I would like eating them enough to want to make batches over and over to iron out issues that might not even matter in the finished product. They're intimidating because there are a lot of ways they can go "wrong" according to the rubric of the ideal, and perfecting them is tedious (as one can imagine from the multitude of blogs proclaiming strategies for troubleshooting to obtain the "perfect" macaron). Plus, the last time I made them, which was admittedly almost a decade ago in college, they were absolutely a disaster, ideal aside. 

But I didn't start this trajectory of patisserie to just make things I think are adequate, I guess. I want to get good, to figure out why some things go wrong and how to fix them, and to make little cakes I will want to eat more than what I see in a pastry shop window. So I dutifully called up a friend who often makes macarons for gatherings of friends and headed to her kitchen with a bunch of equipment in tow for a guided macaron baking session. 

Patisserie 13: Opera/Glazed chocolate and coffee layer cake

 We've arrived at last at one of the most ambitious cakes in patisserie: The Opera Cake, or Gâteau opéra. From Wikipedia: 

It is made with layers of almond sponge cake (known as Joconde in French) soaked in coffee syrup, layered with ganache and coffee,...French buttercream, and covered in a chocolate glaze. Its namesake originates from the layers resembling the levels of an opera theatre

 This cake is meant to be decadent yet delicate, with umpteen variations on its many layers making it a popular cake that presents nicely when sliced to reveal its layers. The version of the cake in The Book has three cake layers, two butter cream layers, a layer of ganache, and a layer of glaze, for a total of six. 

Patisserie 10.5: Paris-Brest again

This is just a short post, but I made the Paris-Brest pastries again, incorporating the following changes that I wanted to improve on from last time: 

• Pipe the correct diameter circles (OD 70mm)
• Using 10mm piping tip for larger choux width
• Chilling the mousseline prior to piping for sharper results
• Filling the pastries more liberally
  
• Figuring out the correct piping pattern for the mousseline
  
• Making a large batch of praline from scratch to eliminate hazelnut chunks that might clog my piping tip

I did still end up using almost an entire extra egg (3.8) compared to the three that the recipe calls for. The larger piping tip resulted in fewer total pastries (14 total), but also had the unintended effect of needing longer to bake. I removed the first batch from the oven a little too early, and this resulted in a few of the rings sagging slightly, though none deflated entirely. Otherwise, though, these rose fairly well and were not overwhelmingly bagel-like.

The ring in the foreground is deflated slightly, while those in the back are round. Should have left them in the oven longer, especially since drying out isn't really a concern with milk in the mix and a filling on top of that.

Since I filled these pastries the same day as I baked them, the choux shells were crisper, but so were the almonds. This resulted in a lot of the almonds chipping off while I was cutting the shells in half. I'm beginning to see why so many modern Paris-Brest variations choose to use pearl sugar as a topping instead. 

I piped an initial ring of chilled mousseline into the bottom half of the choux this time, to fill in some of the space.

I piped an initial ring of mousseline to fill in the cavities in the choux, so the prettier piped ripples would not sink down

Then, I piped loop-de-loops of mousseline in a circle around the pastry, which is a technique I picked up after browsing Instagram to figure out how the heck I was supposed to pipe the mousseline to get those nice ripples when viewed from the side.

Mousseline piped using overlapping loops to achieve the scalloped edges when viewed from the side

The more liberal piping of the mousseline yielded only one dozen Paris-Brest completed, but my, were they picturesque!

Paris-Brest, attempt two! I think this is a faithful reproduction, but I admit I have never had one of these from a patissier before.

Even though I chilled the mousseline prior to piping, the shapes were not as sharp as pictured in The Book, but the mousseline was airier in general than last time. I think I'm ready to move on from choux/this recipe, though I may come back and visit eclairs soon because I've been seeing a lot of beautiful ones coming in lately with fruit flavors as the weather has warmed (and had a delicious strawberry one a few weeks ago). Now I just have this extra praline paste that I have to resist eating with a spoon. 

Quote of the day: 

Patisserie 12: Biscuit Moka/Mocha Cake

 The moka cake is the first "advanced" recipe I've tried from the cakes section of The Book. At first, it was not immediately apparent why this recipe was marked as being harder than the other cakes, because in comparison, the assembly is a lot easier and there are fewer components overall: a sponge cake (similar to the Fraisier from last time), coffee buttercream, and toasted almonds. I suspect the difficulty rating is due to the risks of baking a tall, circular sponge cake, and also in part due to the assembly process of the final cake. But I think, for my first cake of this form factor, that it all went well. It is an atypical shape of cake because it is apparently an Alsacian festive cake, and various flavor profiles can be used. This recipe used rum and coffee as the chief flavorings.

Like in the Fraisier sponge, this sponge cake began with egg whites separated from the yolks, to be whipped into stiff peaks with sugar. However, instead of beating the egg yolks into the meringued whites, the egg yolks were also beaten separately with sugar until they were pale and thick. Additionally, the cake contained flour but also the addition of corn starch. I sifted these two powders, though I perhaps should have sifted them together as well. Back in the day, sifting was important to prevent unsavory milled things from getting mixed in with your flour, but now, it's primarily done to eliminate lumps that will either remain undissolved in the batter and bake up as little raw flour pellets, or necessitate additional folding to incorporate that risks overworking the batter and either deflating it or creating excess gluten formation that will make the cake tough.

The ingredients for the sponge: Egg whites ready for whipping, egg yolks and sugar to be whipped simultaneously, more sugar to whip into the meringue, and flour and cornstarch sifted together.

Patisserie 11: Fraisier/Sponge Cake with Strawberries and Mousseline

I wasn't intending to make this cake until strawberries came into season, usually in May. So I planned to make the biscuit moka and the Opera and then move onto the macarons section. However, for the biscuit moka, a quantity of dark rum was needed, and I had a feeling that brushing these delicate cakes with whiskey like I had been using as a rum substitute up until now would not be the best plan. But I also don't really drink dark rum and didn't want to buy a bottle just for the few tablespoons I'd need, here and there. So I called up my friend Kevin, a rum enthusiast that I had not seen for a while, and we met up for dinner (at a delightful Italian restaurant called Bottega that had just opened a week ago on Valencia St). On our way back to his place for me to pick up some rum, we saw the woman who is often at 21st and Capp Streets, on the corner under the light of a streetlamp, selling boxes of fruit. 

Among these were boxes of strawberries. Kevin immediately suggested we buy some. "Are her strawberries good?" I asked, skeptical. 

He replied, "Her strawberries are the best." 

And that's how I ended up with a half cup of rum and a pound of strawberries that evening, and plans to make the fraisier cake the next day. 

Patisserie 10: Paris-Brest/ Praline buttercream choux pastry

 Since the previous recipe contained a fair amount of hazelnuts and originated the hazelnut praline in this recipe, I decided it would be reasonable to do this one immediately after to decrease making small batches of niche ingredients. 

The Paris-Brest is a circular choux ring that is covered in almonds and filled with praline cream of some sort. The pastry was commissioned to commemorate the Paris-Brest-Paris bicycle race, which is a long-distance race between the two cities and back, and the circular shape of the pastry is meant to evoke a bicycle wheel. Variations in the filling are common, ranging from diplomat cream (stabilized whipped cream) to pure buttercream and everything in between, though the praline (caramelized hazelnut) is a typical base flavor. The version in The Book uses a mousseline cream, which is what you call buttercream + pastry cream + a flavoring (in this case, praline). 

Patisserie 9.5: Succès praliné, but more correctly this time

 I was so angry at how much I'd messed up every step of the cake on Friday that I marched back to the grocery store on Monday morning to buy more hazelnuts and try again. 

And I still didn't buy enough hazelnuts! Turns out hazelnuts are not as heavy as I think they are, and they're also a little expensive. But I hedged my bets this time by also acquiring some hazelnut butter, in case my food processors were unable to handle trying to grind hazelnuts into a paste, especially at the small quantities used in the recipes. So I ground the 160g of roasted hazelnuts for the dacquoise first, and hoped I would be able to caramelize an adequate amount for the praline to be sweet enough.

But considering how delicious the cake was on Friday despite my mistakes, I was looking forward to doing it much better this time. I duly grabbed my candy thermometer and food processor from storage to try and do things right this time around.

Patisserie 9: Succès praliné/Hazelnut Almond Dacquoise (with Italian Meringue buttercream)

 After tackling the most pastry-like intermediate cake recipes in the cake section of The Book, and seeing as it was mid-March and not a great berry season, I and my abundance of egg whites from various pastry creams decided to try making the hazelnut-almond dacquoise cake with Italian meringue buttercream. 

A dacquoise can both refer to this style of cake (hazelnut-almond meringue layers with buttercream) or the cake layer itself (nut meringue). Praline is a paste made of caramel and hazelnuts. Buttercream, contrary to the American style of the frosting that contains only butter and confectioner's sugar, typically in the French tradition includes whipped egg yolks, a meringue of some sort, or, in the case of this recipe from The Book, both. Italian meringue specifically refers to egg whites beaten with a hot sugar syrup (as opposed to the French meringue which is egg whites simply beaten with sugar) and has increased stability because the egg whites get cooked. 

I started this cake at 10am on a Friday morning and by the time it was 1pm, I was covered in sugar and meringue and very mad. Mostly at myself, for making a series of mistakes that cascaded into a cake that was not...bad, exactly, but nothing like the recipe intended.

Patisserie 8: St Honore Cake/Gâteau St. Honoré

 So, I'm a little early on this because St. Honoré’s feast day is on May 16, but this seemed like a good recipe to try due to my previous logic that a lot of good fruit ingredients are not in season yet, I had a small amount of puff pastry still left from my first batch, and this "cake" is more like a composition of puff pastry, choux pastry, and caramelized sugar, filled with pastry cream, and thus a good bridge as I transition from making small pastries into the cakes. 

St Honore is the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs, who did some miracles in French lore, and this cake is apt because of its composition, which showcases several french pastry basics: puff pastry/lamination, choux pastry, pastry cream, caramel, and meringue. The presentation varies, but these components are always somewhere included, and there is an additional traditional component: The St Honore piping tip. This tip is used to create the elegant waves in the Chiboust (combination pastry and meringue) cream filling, and the shape is something like a quenelle with a mohawk. After reading reviews that most people liked the medium sized 882 tip from Ateco, but not wanting to make a web order for a single piping tip, I decided to use my 3D printer to print a piping tip. 

Patisserie 7: Mille-feuille/Napoleon with matcha cream

Almost exactly a month ago, I made my first batch of puff pastry without realizing that the recipe made approximately five times the amount I'd need for that recipe. I still had about two-thirds of that recipe left, so I decided I would use most of that quantity for a Napoleon-style cake, based on the Mille-feuille au Rhum from The Book, since this was mostly a sandwich of puff pastry and pastry cream rather than being an actual cake and would let me use up my first attempt at the pastry so I could start anew in future attempts with my newfound lamination experience. And, as I am not a human who enjoys using spiced rum and the closest thing I had on hand was whiskey, I decided to use matcha to flavor the pastry cream and fondant instead for a burst of color. 

In a distressing deja-vu to the beginning of the previous section's tart, I once again ended up with a dessert that looked fairly reasonable, tasted good, but was impossible to serve and eat in a dignified manner.

Patisserie 6: Apple Almond Danishes

 As I mentioned at the end of my post revisiting tartlets, I feel comfortable moving on from this section, but I was concerned about many of the classic cakes having dependency on berries or other soft summer fruit that was not currently in season. I am currently rolling in an abundance of apples, and I still had those cranberries from the fruit tart I made at the beginning of this month, so I have decided to wrap up this first month of patisserie with a spot of viennoiserie in the form of apple danishes with almond cream. This recipe is technically from the brioche and breakfast pastries section, but as I am pretty experienced with brioche at this point from previous projects and have done two lamination recipes this month, I felt it would be reasonable to try this recipe which combines aspects of both. 

Patisserie 5: Kouign Amann

I decided to make kouign amann because it's such popular classic pastry in recent years, for obvious reasons. I feel like this recipe was a bit of a softball, because it's hard to go wrong with something that's laminated with butter and sugar. But I have some quibbles nonetheless! 

A kouign amann (pronounced like kween a-'mann) is a type of Breton cake, with a yeasted dough that is laminated with butter and sugar and then baked until the sugar caramelizes and the combined steam from the butter and the yeast doing its thing causes the pastry to puff in layers. They're definitely delicious and definitely not good for you. But I had a suspicion I would be able to find enough people to consume the 15 pastries this recipe was going to make. 

Patisserie 4.5: Choux Puff Tartlets, Revisited

 Despite my desire to simply move on in my life and avoid another scaling debacle, I decided it was for the best for me to revisit the choux puff tartlet recipe as promised, making most of the adjustments I mentioned at the bottom of recipe.

Patisserie 3.5: Puff pastry experiment

 You may recall the pear and almond cream tart from a few weeks ago, where the base was a shell of puff pastry that represented my first venture into that category of pastry. In this tart, I was disappointed that the bottom of the shell was very gummy, while the edges were flaky as expected. 

In an effort to ascertain whether the remaining 950g of the homemade puff pastry I had in the fridge was viable, I took out the 250g quarter from last time and let it thaw in the fridge overnight, with the intent of running a mini experiment on this piece of dough. I had a few different things I wanted to try on this pastry: 

• Bake a piece on its own to figure out whether the lamination itself was a failure to create layers, and thus, whether the remainder of the batch could be used in other recipes
  
• Be more gentle in rolling out, letting the dough rest if it was starting to stretch
• Keep my workstation colder and not roll out a delicate butter pastry on top of a hot dishwasher counter
• Flour my cutting board so any stretching/sticking would be an immediately obvious sign to stop rolling and let the dough rest/chill

Patisserie 4: Pâte à choux/Choux Pastry/Cream puff tartlets

 You would think that my track record with The Book would have me a little more humble in my approach by now. A few months ago, while I was still reading up on how to begin my patisserie journey, I stumbled upon the blog Patisserie Makes Perfect, which was the final inspiration for my method. But very early on, the author has extreme difficulty with this recipe for Cream Puff Tartlets, and mentions that they have much difficulty with choux pastry in the past. Now, I've made choux pastry to varying success before, but as described in my very first post, I have no idea why or why not some of my attempts worked. So I assumed that, if I followed the recipe by The Book, everything would at least turn out on par to the blogger's attempt. 

I was half-right: I didn't have to really worry about the choux pastry itself. But everything else that could go wrong in this "intermediate" recipe went wrong in some way. 

According to Wikipedia, the name for pâte à choux is mistakenly attributed to its literal meaning and appearance (choux=cauliflower in french), when instead, it stems from pâte à chaud, or "hot pastry," due to its being cooked butter, flour, and water, to allow the flour to absorb more moisture. This moisture is in turn released during the baking process, creating steam which leavens the pastry dough, usually creating a hollow center and a browned but tender crust. This is the pastry dough that becomes both profiteroles (cream puffs) and eclairs (long cream puffs), as well as paris-brest and religieuses (which are just a profiterole with a smaller profiterole on top), and unfilled versions like chouquettes (small unfilled puffs) and gougeres (savory cheese puffs). 

Patisserie 3: Feuilletage/Puff pastry/Tarte aux Poires/Pear tart with almond cream

I had some pears I wanted to use, so I skipped ahead to an intermediate recipe from the holidays section for a tart with pears, dried fruits, and almond cream. The note at the very bottom of the Tarte aux Poires recipe says: "Readymade all-butter puff pastry dough can replace the homemade." Since I had yet to make any of the puff-pastry-type recipes in the tarts section, I decided to make this one from scratch, essentially turning this one recipe into three (candied orange peel being the third component I needed to make from scratch, also from the holiday section). 

Puff pastry is often used in napoleons and more traditional galettes (french open-faced tinless pies), though recently galettes have sort of fused with pie dough as a base. Puff pastry, like other laminated doughs (doughs that are folded and rolled out multiple times to create layers of butter between layers of dough, rather than creaming together sugar and butter and flour), is very reliant on keeping the dough and butter cold while working with it to minimize the amount of butter absorbed into the dough. The distinct layers then separate slightly during baking, with the steam from the butter layer helping the dough layers puff up and the fat from the butter layer gently frying the dough, achieving a bunch of flaky, crisp layers as a final result. 

To keep the dough cold and flaky, there's three common strategies, usually employed together: 

• Use cold workpieces (marble rolling pin, marble worksurface, or iced work surface)
• Use multiple days to prepare the dough, chilling well in between each folding and rolling process
• Use as little flour as possible and a cold dough to prevent sticking

There's a small fourth rule, for the final rolling out prior to baking, to be gentle and not smush or stretch the dough too much, which I failed to do well, but more on that later.

Patisserie 2: Pâte à étirer/Apple Strudel Tart

 One week into my regimented study of patisserie, and I'm already mixing things up a bit. Due to the apple excess in my house and the fact that my smaller tart rings were not slated to arrive until later this week, I thought I would go ahead and skip to an "Advanced" recipe for Tourte Landaise, or an apple strudel tart. 

Strudel pastry: Thin, unleavened sheets of elastic dough roughly the thickness of phyllo. Usually contains flour, oil, and some salt; this recipe included an egg and cold water as well.

Firstly, this recipe makes 2 9" tarts. Who needs that many tarts? I set out with the intent to split the dough into halves before the resting step so I could freeze one half for a later date. 

I decided to use my stand mixer for mixing, which was one of the options given in the recipe, because the dough looked like it would be sticky at first and require a fair amount of kneading for the gluten formation to create adequate stretching ability. 

Patisserie 1: Pâte Sablée/Orange cream tart/Apple upside down tart

 I've recently found myself with a surplus of time due to some unforeseen circumstances, so I've decided to spend the next few months working on improving my baking skills in a quantifiable manner. As a fan of fancy looking cakes and entremets, I was drawn towards the beautiful works in Modern French Pastry by Cheryl Wakerhauser, but I had no doubt in my mind that this would be a different beast than all my previous baking. 

I've been baking what I roughly categorize as "American Pastry" for the last decade or so: quick breads like banana bread or zucchini bread, flaky biscuits, savory scones, large chewy cookies, muffins, and pies. I started with box mixes (in the interest of not turning this into a "my life story" type of blog, I can provide details of my journey upon request) and have gradually improved to the point where a Pulitzer Prize winner once told me, "this pie crust is like crack." It's one of my proudest cooking moments. 

My first attempt at a NY style cheesecake, which came out perfect even without a bain-marie

 

 

First attempt at chocolate babka, where I threw in some cacao nibs.

 I figure if you're already here on my blog, you're down to see me flex my talent at baking, where somehow I've accumulated enough XP through sheer quantity of the procrastibaking I did in college that I can make pretty good things the first time around.

But I have a terrible habit.