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.
The first of these was to chill the cinnamon sugar tart pastry dough for way longer than the 2 hour minimum stated. I made the dough and allowed it to chill overnight. It's worth mentioning that the weather in San Francisco was much cooler this week, and even the dough right after mixing was much firmer and easier to shape into a disc without the aid of a plastic wrap barrier.
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The cinnamon orange sweet pastry dough was much firmer now that the weather was back in the mid sixties.
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The next day, I pulled the dough out of the fridge and rolled it out with much less difficulty than before. A light dusting of flour was all it took for the dough to flatten with minimal tears and stickiness.
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I started to reach the limits of my cutting board surface area this time while rolling out. The dough was much more cooperative and less sticky.
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You'll notice that I was able to get the tart dough rolled out much thinner and larger than last time, owing to the cooler temperature and resulting increased workability. This is much closer to the 3mm the recipe calls for!
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This is the thickness I was supposed to do last time!
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I stuck the entire sheet of tart dough back into the fridge to chill while I prepared the rest of the recipe, because the tart shells are the last thing to bake before assembly. In the meantime, I prepared a batch of choux pastry, using only half the recipe. I made sure to cook the dough until it came together into a ball and then continued to cook until a thin film was coating the inside of the saucepan before putting it into a bowl to dry.
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Delicious choux hot flour-butter-milk ball, pre-egg addition
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Having read from a bunch of online sources that the choux batter is, indeed, supposed to be runny enough to plop off the spoon and leave a "V" shaped tail on the spoon, I resigned myself to adding the first two eggs, beating the third in a small bowl, and then adding bits of the third egg and beating the batter in between each addition, and testing with a drop from the spoon whether I'd gotten the right consistency. When it seemed to look like the photos online (glossy, distinct V tail), I spooned it into a slightly smaller pastry piping bag than last time.
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Choux batter in bag, prepared for piping
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I made sure to butter the pans instead of using cooking spray like last time, in hopes that the increased resistance would prevent as much spreading. I piped two pans, and in order to discern whether it was piping technique or resting time that affected how they baked, I baked the second piped pan first (ostensibly the one with better piping skills), and let the first one rest in the meantime.
As you can see in the photos, I piped the puffs much smaller than I did in my previous attempt. As the batter wants to spread a bit, I actually piped circles about 0.5" in diameter, and was careful to not overload each circle with too much batter. I still ended up with way more than the minimum 35 puffs, though it was not off by double.
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The left pan is the one I piped first, and the one on the right second, though the latter went into the oven first. I definitely got better at spacing.
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While the puffs baked, I prepared the pastry cream, and I'm pleased to announce that there was not a scramble in sight! Just a nice pot of silky whisked vanilla cream, which I set in the fridge to chill. The immersion blender reconstitution method will have to wait until I mess up the cream in a future recipe. (The Modern French Pastry book swears by using a microwave for pastry cream; I'm curious to try this as well, as whisking anxiously is quite a workout)
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A nice silky unscrambled pastry cream this time!
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It was time to cut out the tart shells. These were a far cry in stability compared to last time; they were distinct enough to even stack atop one another while I prepared the rings! I was still concerned about how quickly they warmed, however, so after I pressed them into the rings, I returned the quarter sheet of shells to the fridge to chill for a bit longer while I baked the second batch of choux puffs.
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So much easier to cut out and work with the tart shells this time, though I did still chill them in their rings prior to baking as they softened quickly at this thickness.
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The second batch of puffs did puff up larger, which lends some credence to the resting theory, but I'm not sure it's worth the wait time. However, I did also find that my sheet pans are not as flat as I thought. Several of the cream puffs slithered along the buttered curvature and created these little choux caterpillars, which, cute as they are, are unsuitable for filling. We enjoyed them as a vector for dipping some of the celeriac-cucumber-potato soup I made for dinner.
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Accidental choux caterpillars. Maybe I could make one long blobby eclair if I was clever about piping next time
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I snapped a photo of the lined tart shells to prove that they were very thinly walled and unpuffed before baking, and that they went all the way up to the top of the rings. However...
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Tart shells, pre baking
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...when they emerged from the oven, they were slightly burnt, shrunken down, and very puffy. I'm kind of at a loss for what else to try, except maybe to weight the centers of the tart shells so they don't rise and hopefully don't drag the walls in with them? I might also give up on buttering the stainless steel tart rings altogether, they don't seem to have any issues with the shells sticking and I think the difference in heat conductivity is messing up how fast the edges of the tarts brown vs the center/bottom of the tarts, which are on the aluminum baking sheet. I'm also unclear if they should be cooked with convection fan on, though I am assuming since it is a butter pastry that it would prefer quick, uniform heat rather than the conventional bake.
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Can you tell I have some hot spots in my oven?
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Nonethless, I trudged forward and remembered to fill the tart shells first this time with the pastry cream after everything had sufficiently cooled. I used an offset spatula to spread the cream around, none too cleanly alas.
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I remembered to fill the tart shells first this time, as they were a limiting factor last time for pastry cream consumption
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And once more, I found myself running out of pastry cream before all the tarts could be assembled with the proper quantity of four choux puffs on each tart. Here are the results of the recipe's stated quantity of tart dough and pastry cream, along with only half the quantity of the choux pastry:
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Scaling was still quite a bit off. On the left plate we have all the tarts and choux puffs I had pastry cream for. On the right plate are some of the unfilled puffs (sans choux caterpillars) and leftover tart crust turned into cinnamon orange shortbread cookies
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By this time, I was several hours into this recipe and quite fed up, but determined to make a nice photo at least. So I heated up some apricot preserves (I could not manage to find any without large fruit chunks; I blame Rainbow Grocery for being too bougie and only having "real fruit" in jars. What if I want to have oddly clear sweet jelly for decorative purposes instead of actual nutrition???) and dipped each of the cream puffs from the tarts that had enough puffs to create a proper pyramid, and then rolled them in Belgian pearl sugar. And even though my chocolate drizzling still leaves much to be desired (paper cone, I will approach you some other day when I am less tired of a recipe), the end result is still very photogenic and much more delicate looking than my previous attempt! I left out the whipped cream because a lot of my housemates were away this weekend, and I knew the whipped cream peaks would become runny if not eaten rather immediately.
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Glamour shot! The sugar and glaze really did make a huge difference in how polished the tarts look.
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I think I'm ready to leave this recipe. In fact, I believe there are very few recipes in this section remaining before I feel comfortable moving on to...cakes? Unfortunately, it's not a great season for most berries, and I was fortunate to start this section with many winter fruits, so maybe I will continue on with some viennoiserie like danishes or cakes with nuts components before heading onto classics like the frasier.
Some thoughts:
- I'd like to try weighting down the tart pans for the blind bake next time.
- Probably don't need to keep buttering the SS tart rings.
- Keeping the dough cold definitely helped, but not as much as I thought it would. I might also try leaving some overhang on the tart rings in addition to the weights.
- I got a lot better at piping, both the choux and the cream.
- I'm going to have to practice making a parchment cone for piping chocolate one of these days. Maybe for that rum napoleon?
- I now have a new mystery: why are my choux puffs smooth on top and little domes instead of being slightly crackled puffs? Many people online have troubleshooting questions about their choux puffs being too irregular or not hollow, but mine are kind of unfailingly regular and smooth and hollow with this recipe. Maybe I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth? Or perhaps these smooth-topped puffs are preferable for recipes that include stacking configurations, like this or a St. Honore. I just wish they would "puff" more so the base would not be so wide.
Quote of the week: "There's really no way to not make the chocolate look like diarrhea, huh?" - my supportive partner Matt after attempting his one chocolate drizzle guest shot.
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