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.

The hazelnuts gave me trouble from the beginning, because I misread the recipe and thought that the caramelized sugar glazed hazelnuts for the praline were the same as the ones used in the dacquoise, because both sections called for 160g of hazelnuts. So I didn't even buy enough hazelnuts to start with. 

On top of this, I decided to use up the leftover caramelized sugar from the St Honore cake to coat the hazelnuts for the praline, not realizing that 244 degrees F is not actually high enough of a temperature to caramelize sugar, so the recipe actually asks for sugar to be slightly above the soft ball stage (240F), not the caramel stage (340F and above). Silly me, assuming that caramelized hazelnut praline would need sugar to start as a caramel. 

I ran the hazelnuts through the food processor briefly and melted down the caramelized sugar with the remainder of the weight in sugar with the water in a saucepan. I should have realized I was going to have issues when the caramel took a very long time to dissolve. 

I tried reusing caramelized sugar from dipping the St. Honore cream puffs

My next mistake was being too lazy this early in the morning to go rummage around in our storage area for my candy thermometer in my kitchen items box. Instead, I was using the handheld instant infrared thermometer, which only reads surface temperature, but I figured it should be fine. Ultimately, I don't believe this was a huge issue, but it was less able than a proper submerged candy thermometer to give me a good sense of the bulk temperature of the sugar.

This is definitely not a candy thermometer

Nonetheless, I turned off the heat and stirred in the hazelnuts when the temp reached 244deg F. It should have served as a red flag when the sugar did not crystallize at all, and the hazelnuts just globbed around in a sticky caramel sauce, but I duly cooked them for a few minutes longer and, when it appeared they were all coated, I dumped them out onto a parchment covered baking sheet to cool. The Book noted that the sugar would crystallize upon adding the hazelnuts and that they would take some more time on the heat before they became coated with caramel, but I just chalked this up to being lucky. Pro tip: working with sugar is science, never luck.

The clumpiness and stickiness of the glazed hazelnuts did not bode well.

And the case of the mistaken hazelnut identity begins! I portioned out 75g of the candied hazelnuts aside for a praline paste, and ground the rest with the almond flour. This is not what the recipe wanted me to do; I was supposed to get a different 160g of hazelnuts to grind with the almond flour. In my defense, the book just keeps calling things "the hazelnuts", and both sections call for the same quantity. It's kind of confusing! But by the time I reread the recipe, it was too late, so I resigned myself to using the 75g of reserved hazelnuts later.

These are the wrong hazelnuts! I should have bought more hazelnuts and ground the unglazed ones!

I whipped the 320g (11 egg whites!) of egg whites with about a third of the sugar at medium speed (4) until soft peaks formed. I have found that while whipping at a higher speed (6) can build up structure more quickly initially, this structure is a lot of large bubbles, while the lower speed yields a finer bubbled denser foam. So my preference is to do about 5 minutes at speed 4 until the egg whites start to become a foam with uniform visible bubbles, and then kick it up to 6 for another 5 minutes until the bowl is full of soft, opaque egg white foam.

In the photo below, I'm showing the soft peak that droops over when I turn the beater upside down. The French call this "bec d'oiseaux," or a bird beak, because of the resemblance.

The bird's beak state of soft peaks whipped egg whites

At this point, I added the rest of the sugar (turning the mixer off), and while this deflates the egg whites a little bit, I turned the mixer back onto 6 and let it whip rapidly until stiff peaks were formed, and the meringue was thick and glossy. Sugar helps give the meringue structure; this mixture was quite firm by the time I stopped to swipe a beater to snap the stiff peak photo, and it was very scoopable!

A stiff peak! And a nice glossy meringue!

I folded the almond and hazelnut ground mixture into the egg white and sugar meringue, making sure to get the bottom scraped to the top to incorporate evenly. It swished as I folded, but overall did not deflate very much.

Just...fold it in

I decided to try piping the cake batter, and as you can see in the photo, I'm resorting to ever larger, taller containers to hold my piping bags while I fill them, here using a pitcher. I attempted to fit half of the batter into the piping bag.

Ambitious piping bag filling going on in there. You're supposed to only fill them about 2/3 full

I'm glad I had the foresight to only put half the batter into the piping bag, and to stop when I ran out. As you can see, my frustrations continued as I realized each half of the batter only filled up about two thirds of the two sheet pans I lined with parchment per the recipe.

Hmm yes planning ahead is good

I used my offset spatula to smooth the batter out as gently as I could, but this caused the batter to be laid out very thinly, plus I think the double action of first being piped and then being smoothed did my lightness no favors. Nonetheless, I stuck the first pan in the oven to bake with convection heat.

I tried to salvage it by spreading them to be roughly the size of the pan, in about a quarter inch for the layer height

Meanwhile, I tried to make the praline with the reserved candied hazelnuts, but exhausted both our food processor and our nutribullet blender (and some magic smoke even escaped from the nutribullet). The sugar covering the hazelnuts was gummy instead of crisp. I was too lazy to go get my own food processor from the downstairs storage area, so I scooped the results into a bowl. With the oils escaping from the hazelnuts and the clumpy, sticky sugar caramel making blobs of ground hazelnuts, this looked indistinguishable from ground beef crumbles. Joy.

Ground beef that tastes like hazelnut praline. It's like one of those videos where all these household items are secretly made of cake or chocolate. I guess I could make a hazelnut shepherd's pie lookalike

And, of course, I forgot to rotate my first pan of dacquoise halfway through, so the thinner edge got to the verge of burning, yielding a crisp meringue instead of a light sponge.

Slightly burned one side of my first dacquoise by forgetting to rotate the pan and spreading it too thin

My second pan fared better, and was also spread less thinly, though my sloppiness in going off the parchment on the top and bottom edges made the parchment/cake hard to remove from the pan to a cooling rack. After a few minutes in the pan, I moved each cake layer to a rack to cool completely on the parchment.

Second dacquoise sheet was better. I don't trust my oven to bake both sheets evenly at once on different racks, even with the convection fan on.

At least the ordeal of the cake and the hazelnuts were done for the time being. I began on the buttercream. I realized at this point that I had failed to bring the three sticks of butter to room temperature, and stuck them in the cooling oven with the door open for a few minutes for some emergency butter softening, hastened by the ire that laced my sighs of frustration.

As I mentioned before, some buttercreams use only Italian meringue or egg yolks, but the recipe from The Book uses both. This means at least two large bowls are used in addition to the stand mixer bowl, to hold each of the prepared egg components while the butter is whipped last before putting it all together. This is certainly a recipe to put both my stand mixer and my counter space to the test.  

Italian meringue is more stable than French meringue because the sugar is heated with water until it becomes a syrup at the soft ball stage of candy (244deg F), and then whipped into the egg whites. Because I like to whip my egg whites at a slightly lower speed, I started the 2.5 egg whites and 25g of sugar in the stand mixer as soon as all the 100g of sugar had dissolved into the water in my saucepan, and then returned to the saucepan to check the temperature of the sugar as it began to bubble. Some of the sugar stuck to the edges and began to crystallize when we approached the soft ball temp, but for the most part, the candy remained dissolved and syrupy. 

While creating candy from sugar syrup, I noticed two long delays during an otherwise fairly linear increase in temperature under constant heat application. The first happened around 200-210 degrees F, which I assume is around the time that the water was being boiled off from the mixture.  Dissolving the water in sugar first, instead of just melting the sugar down, helps prevent the grains of sugar on the edges from otherwise burning, because the meringue should have no caramelization or hint of things other than pure white sugar. The second delayed temperature response began around 230 degrees, which I assume is around the time the sugar begins to reorganize itself in preparation to hit the soft ball crystallization stage. So, there's a little bit of flexibility around keeping an eye on the mixture, because the temperature climb will slow down a little before the soft ball/temp goal is hit, and will also slow down a little bit after because the hard ball stage is around 255 shortly thereafter. 

I pulled the saucepan of sugar syrup off of the stove when the temperature hit 245 degrees, and brought it over to my stand mixer, where my egg whites had achieved the opaque white color of soft peaks. I set up the feeder chute on the rim of the bowl (no idea what this is actually called) because I was both scared of missing the bowl while trying to pour the hot syrup down the side of the bowl but not directly on the egg whites, and also scared of hot sugar meringue flying everywhere. But, as the drip trail you can see in the photo below indicates, I had no trouble keeping the syrup stream mostly on the bowl itself, and the egg whites kept themselves in tidy order while the sugar syrup was whipped in. After all the syrup was poured in, what remained of this step was to simply continue to beat the egg white and sugar mixture until the side of the bowl, currently warm, was room temperature to the touch. It took about ten minutes to cool down.

I was so nervous about the sugar syrup pouring into the egg whites while they were beating, but it turned out fine and there was no splattering.

The resulting meringue was quite stiff, and I scraped it into a bowl and set it aside and washed the stand mixer bowl in preparation for the egg yolk whipping.

Beautiful glossy and firm, stiff peaks of Italian meringue

Here are my five egg yolks to be whipped, and yet another bag of egg whites destined for a stay in the fridge or freezer until they are next needed.

Happiness is a recipe that uses the same amount of egg yolks as whites.

I heated the sugar syrup for the egg yolks similarly as I did for the whites, with the exception being that egg yolks do not have to be whipped to any peaks so I simply beat them on a low speed until the syrup was ready. Once the syrup had hit the correct temperature, I increased the speed on the mixer and poured the syrup down the side of the bowl into the yolks in a slow stream, and then whipped until the mixture became thick and pale, falling from the beater in a quick ribbon when raised. This also got transferred to a bowl, and the mixer bowl was cleaned YET AGAIN in preparation for whipping the final component, butter.

To think egg yolk candy turns this color when whipped!

My butter was kind of melted but mostly soft, and I scraped the sticks off of the quarter sheet pan (these things are really dang useful!) and into the stand mixer to whip at medium speed until smooth and creamy. Then, the egg yolk mixture was scraped into the bowl, and it was mixed with the butter until light and smooth again. I had to scrape down the sides a few times to make sure all the butter got mixed in.

I guess even French buttercream has obnoxious amounts of butter in it

Finally, the Italian meringue is beat in at a very low speed. I only beat the buttercream at a low speed here for fear of deflating the meringue. You can see the difference between the whipped buttercream on the beater versus the unincorporated remnants on the spoon I used to scrape the bowl.

Whipping in the other two buttercream ingredients into the butter

With the buttercream more or less complete (minus the praline because that just...didn't happen), I set to work cutting the cakes. I tried to place my adjustable cake rectangle on the smaller of the cakes so that all of the edges sat on the cake. I decided to use the smaller/overbaked dacquoise for the bottom because the harder cake would be a better bottom structure. Some of the edges were very crisp and shattered when I cut around the perimeter. This is due to my overbaking; the cake should have been somewhat dry but not hard. Once I cut the first dacquoise, I held the size of the rectangle constant and placed it over the other piece to cut the top half of the dacquoise, and then set the cake rectangle back around the first piece to create a border in which I would spread the buttercream,

Cutting the bottom dacquoise layer from the crunchier of the two

My cake rectangle is a little deep, which made spreading the buttercream difficult even with my large offset spatula. But I made a layer as evenly as I could and sprinkled most of the failed praline experiment hazelnuts on top evenly, before placing the top layer on. 

I made yet another mistake here in trying to remove the entire cake layer from the parchment before laying it on. The cake was floppy and tore in a few places under its own weight as I transferred it over and pressed it on top of the buttercream inside the cake ring. I was then able to remove the cake ring, which I did by sliding it up after giving a few compressions to the sides to square up the edges.

Making a nice shepherd's pie in the cake ring over there

The final size of the cake was around 13"x10", and I covered it with plastic wrap and set it in the fridge to let the butter cream set for a few hours. This also serves to soften the cake somewhat by letting it absorb moisture from the cream and the flavors to blend; The Book recommends bringing the cake out 10 minutes before serving.

Ta-da! A giant smore!

Here is the cake as it was cut later that evening with a sharp knife. You can see that my dacquoise layers are quite compressed, but the ratio of buttercream to cake is about right (buttercream is about twice as thick as one cake layer). I sifted powdered sugar over the top once, brushed it around, and then sprinkled more on top to achieve the velvety texture, and then I sprinkled what was left of the ground beef praline crumbs on top before serving.

It looks like a solid "hell yeah!" of a cake, despite all my struggles making it happen

People mentioned that they liked the crispness of the bottom dacquoise for the textural contrast it provided, though I think properly caramelized hazelnuts would have done the trick in the recipe if I had made it as intended. All told, I'm shocked this turned out as well as it did as I messed up something in nearly every step of this recipe. This is my first time making a layer cake the French way (short, sponge- or meringue-based, french buttercream) and it was delicious and very professional looking. 

Thoughts:

• The sugar level was just right but should not be sweeter. If I do the full quantity of caramelized hazelnuts next time, I'm going to only do one sifting of powdered sugar on top (so hopefully I also won't keep choking on inhaled sugar)
• I should just go get my candy thermometer; I don't know enough about sugar to be making hot swaps like this and playing with surface temperature guns. 
  
• I hope my other food processor is up to the task of grinding up candied hazelnuts into praline
• I think I could have whipped the buttercream harder once the Italian meringue was completely incorporated. It was not under risk of deflating and would have been pretty good if it were lighter.
• I will try directly spreading the batter for the dacquoise next time instead of piping, and also spreading to a smaller final dimension, trying to keep about a centimeter of layer height prior to baking. No need for this to become a larger cake than it is already. 
• How in the world do they turn these out in baking shows in less than four hours without a recipe? Every step is so consuming and takes so long!
• Removing the dacquoise from the parchment is a delicate process; I'm going to try inverting the top layer of the cake into the square before peeling off the parchment, since the paper backing gives it more integrity while transferring over.
  
• French buttercream is delicious, there is buttery sweetness but also an additional rich mouthfeel from the eggs that fills out the taste without being greasy like butter, and the melting quality from the air whipped into the buttercream is divine. 

Quote of the day: "I see you're making lasagna." -my roommate Steven upon walking into the kitchen as I'm sprinkling the hazelnuts onto the buttercream layer