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.

I prepared the pastry cream first, using some of this vanilla bean paste with seeds because I can't afford to buy a vanilla bean for every single pastry cream batch I make. I used roughly 1.5 teaspoons of paste for the quantity of cream, which was not enough but would be a fine backdrop for the matcha; in the future, I'll probably use closer to 2tsp if the vanilla is to be the star of the show.

I'm not rich enough (and just became funemployed) to be using real vanilla beans in each of these practice pastries

I weighed out my cornstarch and flour and prepared a bowl for collecting the 6(!) egg whites from the separated yolks.

Here's the cornstarch and flour, and a bowl waiting for egg whites to be separated into it and frozen in the bag in the background. One day I'm going to move out and people will be finding odd quantities of frozen egg whites in baggies for years in the freezer

I think the brand of eggs I buy has a smaller egg yolk-to-egg white ratio than the eggs in the book. The instructions for the creme pat always say "whisk until sugar is just dissolved, without letting mixture lighten in color," but it takes me a long time to even incorporate all the cornstarch and sugar into the small amount of liquidity from the yolks, and the sugar often requires a rest and return to stirring to dissolve, and even then, it is still a little grainy. I froze the six egg whites in the labeled ziploc to use later in the week for a different recipe; now that I've gotten into the cakes section, I'm sure I'll be rolling in egg yolks instead for the next month.

The ill-chosen small bowl because I read the recipe wrong, with egg whites separated from the yolks for the recipe

Now, it was here that I made an annoying mistake. I had neglected to read the recipe correctly where it called for me to whisk the egg yolks with the cornstarch and sugar "in a medium bowl", and as you can see in the above photo, I was using a very small bowl. 

This was a problem because the next step called for not only tempering the yolk mixture with some of the heated milk, but to eventually pour all the heated milk into the yolk mixture to whisk. So I had to transfer the custard base to a larger bowl, wash the little bowl, and then continue on my tempering. For any reader that is unaware, tempering a custard refers to the practice of whisking a small quantity (a quarter to a third) of the heated component into the coagulatory component (in this case, slowly drizzling in the hot milk into the egg yolk-sugar-mixture) so that the coagulatory mixture can increase in temperature gradually and absorb the heat more evenly, rather than cooking upon contact and causing curdling to happen. The picture below shows the color of the tempered egg mixture on the right, and after tempering, I mixed in the remainder of the hot milk at a much slower whisking pace.

On the right is the bowl of yolk custard tempered with about a third of the hot milk. Notice it's a little frothy.

I then strained the mixture back into the saucepan, and was surprised to find that despite my frenzied whisking, there was still a fair layer of scrambled yolk bits coating the sieve. I guess the straining was worth it!

Looks like a few bits of scrambled egg happened despite the tempering!

I returned the mixture to the stovetop to whisk over medium heat until it just began to thicken, then pulled it from the stove and continued whisking as it finished cooking from residual heat. Finally, I whisked cubed butter. I'm pretty comfortable making pastry cream silky smooth at this point, which is good because there's a reason they call it creme pat: it's in almost every pastry recipe in some form or another.

Silky creme patisserie. I am letting myself celebrate getting pretty good at doing this without much thought

I spread it on a plastic-lined quarter sheet pan and topped it with another piece of plastic wrap, smoothing outwards from the center to remove any bubbles because any place that contacts air will create a skin on the pastry cream and result in an unpleasant texture once it has cooled. I stuck this sheet pan in the fridge to chill completely while I worked on the rest of the recipe.

Quarter sheet of creme pat, covered with plastic wrap and ready to chill

Here is the roughly-800g block of puff pastry from early February, thawed in the fridge overnight. I cut it into quarters, which worked well because this recipe has three distinct layers and this left me a square shape for a later recipe. I took out three of the quarters and put the last one in the fridge for a secret future recipe. I used painters tape again to mark out the desired final dimensions of the puff pastry, leaving space on either side of the 5in mark on the bottom for movement while rolling out. I also noticed during my puff pastry experiment from a few weeks ago that it had shrunk quite a bit while baking, so one of the improvements I wanted to make was to roll it slightly oversize before putting it in the oven to compensate for the expected deviation in final dimension.

I set up my workstation by marking out the desired dimensions with painter's tape and dusting with flour

After the first rolling out, I recognized a fair bit of resistance, and remembering my previous mistakes in smashing it too flat and ending up with gummy puff pastry, I put the three sheets back in the fridge to rest for another fifteen minutes. This would also serve to decrease the amount of shrinkage later during baking.

Starting with three quarters of the puff pastry and rolling them out in turn, rotating to a different piece when I felt resistance

By the second rolling out, I was at the expected final width but still a little short of the final length. I gave it a good roll and then stuck it back in the fridge for another rest.

Size is almost there after the second rolling but it was starting to warm and resist, so I put them back in the fridge to chill and rest.

After a third roll, they were roughly 14" long and 6" wide (a standard half sheet pan like in the below photo is roughly 16"x12") compared to the desired final length of 10"x5" for each piece. I placed two of them on one pan and put the third back in the fridge to chill while these baked.

I almost got ambitious and tried to fit all three on one pan, but listened to the recipe instead

I perforated each sheet a few times with a fork and sprinkled sugar on top. These were baked for 24 minutes on convection heat with a sheet of parchment on top and a second half-pan nested atop to keep the pastry as flat as possible as it baked, and also to help caramelize the sugar on top.

Perforated puff pastry with sugar sprinkled on top to caramelize during baking

While the first batch of puff pastry sheets baked, I pulled my chilled pastry cream back out and prepared to incorporate the matcha. I was really surprised when the pastry cream sloughed off the plastic wrap in an almost-clean sheet; in past experience, the pastry cream has always stuck to the plastic wrap, and I assumed this was a sacrificial layer to prevent a skin from being formed. But it seems that when properly chilled, the cream likes to stick to itself far more.

Lovely appetizing congealed pastry cream!

As I was mixing in the two tablespoons of matcha powder, I noticed quite a few lumps that had not been apparent before because they blended in with the color of the rest of the cream. You can see on that I dug out on the surface of the bowl below. I started to press the matcha cream through a sieve into the piping bag, and was relieved when these lumps just disintegrated with a little pressure. It seems that they were collected cornstarch rather than scrambled bits of egg, and just needed some extra encouragement to get blended.

As seen in the bowl on the right in the photo, there's a white lump of cornstarch mixture/cooked flour that was not correctly incorporated. They were revealed when I mixed in the matcha. I pushed the cream through a fine meshed sieve into the piping bag to eliminate these.

When I pulled the first batch of pastry sheets out of the oven, I saw that they had shrunk quite a bit more in length than in width, but thankfully were still pretty similar in size.

Puff pastry has shrunk quite a bit, and they browned nicely but were fairly stiff.

When the third sheet finished baking as well, I stacked them on top of one another and leveled off the sides with a serrated knife. The sugared puff pastry scraps were very delicious and eaten immediately by myself and my friend Cam while I waited for the pastry to cool completely.

I stacked these sheets on top of each other and used a serrated knife to even out the left and right sides, but I left the ends rounded because I figured the end pieces always kind of get the short straw.

I filled the bag with half the pastry cream and piped it liberally in large rows across the first layer of pastry using a plain, 10mm tip. I repeated this for the second layer with the second half of the pastry cream, and I still had a little bit of cream left over (though not enough for another layer).

My pastry cream piping looked so neat and professional! It's a pity this cake GOT RUINED when I tried to cut it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

For the fondant topping, The Book calls out in several different recipes to simply water down "fondant icing" with a precise amount of water in milliliters. I had no way of knowing what kind of fondant icing to acquire because most of the fondant I've seen is a solid brick that has to be rolled out and draped over a cake, so I went to the kind folks at Spun Sugar, which is a baking supply store in North Berkeley close to the BART station there. As soon as I explained that I was looking for fondant to make napoleons, they pointed out a bag of dry fondant powder, and I picked up two pounds and happily made my way home. 

Fondant, for many of us, is that weird chalky, sugary, elastic-but-gummy-paste layer atop cakes that look a little too polished and plastic. This is specifically rolled fondant, as it is rolled out like a dough and wrapped around things. A lot of rolled fondant from home kitchens is made from melting marshmallows with sugar and other things, because this allows one to skip the step of heating up sugar to one of the candy temperatures in order to create structure, then creating a supersaturated solution of it in water prior to inducing crystallization and forming a dough. The problem is that this often tastes awful. In my experience eating non-marshmallow fondant, it is sweet but not cloying, and usually counterbalanced well by the remainder of the pastry if the shop knows what the prevailing opinion of fondant is like.

Fondant icing is, ostensibly, pre-made fondant, and dry fondant powder is simply fondant that is dried and then ground, and thus easily reconstituted with powder. The instruction on the bag for petit fours, which typically use a poured fondant, said to add a third cup of water to the entire pound bag. I knew this would be way too much icing, but I think I did not add enough water instead; you can see a skin began forming in the pot before I even started to pour, when The Books states that I should be waiting roughly 15 minutes for the fondant glaze to finish setting. I added about half a teaspoon of matcha to get a light green color.

I'm pretty sure poured fondant is not supposed to start forming a skin as soon as you remove it from heat and begin to stir. Alas.

Indeed, I had a hard time spreading the fondant evenly because it began setting way too quickly. But I gave it a few swipes with an offset spatula, got as much coverage as I could on the top layer, and moved onto the elusive parchment cone for doing the chocolate drizzle. 

I used a half-sheet-pan's worth of parchment for the initial triangle this time, allowing me to get a stapler into the cone to seal the edges in shape. And I made sure to melt the chocolate fully and then some so it was liquid enough to pour in and not harden while I piped. But...

The parchment bag looked so legit this time, and I even had space to staple! But it was still awful to pipe with!

I AM STILL UNCONVINCED THIS IS REASONABLE TO USE! I REFUSE! I'M JUST GOING TO USE A PLASTIC PIPING BAG NEXT TIME INSTEAD! UGH!

As you can see, the chocolate was still hard to pipe at a reasonable thickness; the open end of the parchment piping bag got wider and wider as I piped, and I'm not sure how one could maintain tension in the rolled structure. It also became more obvious that my fondant was not the right texture, as the chocolate just sat on top instead of falling flush into the fondant. Oh well. I marbled it the best I could, and it looked fairly presentable if you didn't know what a napoleon was supposed to look like.

The fondant was definitely too stiff, and the (badly piped) chocolate did not settle into the icing at all. But I was too many hours into this recipe to stop now.

...And then I tried to cut it. Reader, I really did try. The Book told me to use a sharp, finely-serrated knife. As the evidence suggests in the below photo, I tried not one, but three different serrated knives, none yielding any better results that the next. The amount of pastry cream that squeezed out represents all the tears of frustration that threatened to squeeze out of my eyes. I had to put the knife (knives) down between each slice to take several deep breaths and try to calm myself down before I just tore this entire cake apart and threw it in the trash. How am I supposed to cut this? 

I managed to clean up the edges of the slices and sent some off with my friend Cam for his house, and brought a few over to my partner and metamour and her partner for dinner (what a polyamorous clause). And here, after even a few hours of chilling and assumed softening of the puff pastry, I ran into the last consternation of this "cake."

Behold: Disaster.

The cake was really hard to eat, because the puff pastry was very hard to cut through, so every stab of the fork just caused the pastry cream to squeeze out everywhere until you could eventually press the pastry against the bottom of the plate, saw it apart, and swipe up some pastry cream to eat it with. Again, really tasty, but absolutely not the way this cake should be eaten. I am really unclear about why this happened, but I don't really care for this cake that much as a class of cakes, so while I have some thoughts about how I would change this in the future, I don't think I will make this again in the foreseeable future unless I use store bought puff pastry. I'll get a few other chances to work with the fondant icing in recipes such as petit fours soon. 

Thoughts on how this went and how to improve: 

•  The layering in my first attempt at puff pastry continues to impress me, despite how poorly I thought I did based on the first usage. It really does just matter a lot to let it rest and be gentle in rolling out.
• The puff pastry did still shrink a lot, but I think I will just continue to compensate for this by rolling out larger than called for, which seems more than possible to get good results in texture with.
• I am wondering if using a sheet pan to weigh the pastry down while it baked was part of why it came out with such a dense, hard surface and didn't crack apart easily. Next time I will use the cooling rack to weigh it down, and while the layers might not be as flat that way, it will better resemble the tender flakiness of the experiment I ran a few weeks ago with the scrap pastry. 
• The vanilla bean paste worked well, though I needed to use about double the initial amount I intended to get enough seeds for that nice visual effect and occasional pop of mouthfeel. It is still more cost effective than getting pods at this point, and less annoying, so we'll see how far I can take this before someone calls out the vanilla flavor not being good enough. 
• The lumpiness of the pastry cream really makes me wonder what the homogeneous color has been hiding from me all this time. Since the pushing through a sieve took forever, I will endeavor to run an immersion blender through it in the future regardless, just to not have the possibility of lumps. 
• Some people on the internet recommended letting the cake chill and "set" for a bit before cutting, and also to use a sharp knife rather than sawing with a serrated knife. I will try this in a future cake, and am annoyed that I didn't think to try either on this iteration before I had already cut the whole thing. 
• I'm going to watch a video on the proper temperature and texture for poured fondant before I try my next attempt, so I don't have to just put water in and pray that it will be correct when it's cooled. 
• I'M GOING TO GET PLASTIC BAGS FOR PIPING CHOCOLATE, THE PARCHMENT CONE IS UNNECESSARY AND ANNOYING AND IS A WASTE OF MY NICE, PRE-CUT PARCHMENT SHEETS. 
• The puff pastry scraps with caramelized sugar continue to be tasty AF. I think that where other people seem to fetishize the perfect croissant as the pinnacle of laminated pastry, or perhaps pain au chocolate, I adore a well-made palmier, and perhaps I should redirect my energies to creating reliable versions of palmiers the next time I decide to make puff pastry. Nobody should have to live with their memories of palmiers being the stale, dry-yet-sticky giant wholesale-cookies of their childhood. The palmier at Arsicault in SF literally changed my mind on the entire pastry and it is now one of my favorite things.
  

Quote of the day: Me- "It looks like shit." My friend Cam- "Delicious, delicious shit."