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...

 1. Chouquettes. I was tasked with making something for a small picnic we were having. In the interest of not making something too sweet or requiring refrigeration, as well as something not messy, I decided to make chouquettes, which are just unfilled choux puffs with sugar atop. I was originally going to use the Belgian pearl sugar as the traditional decoration, but was unable to find it easily at any of the grocery stores I went to, so I decided to try doing a craquelin instead. 

A craquelin is a crunchy streusel-like topping of sugar, flour, and butter that is typically rolled out, frozen, then cut out and placed atop the piped puffs, coating the top of the puff and expanding/crisping as they bake. I used the craquelin recipe from David Lebovitz and tried a few different choux recipes, and I also had to experiment somewhat with the oven.

Left and right are batches 1 and 2 of chouquette testing. In batch 1, I halved the recipe but forgot to halve the flour (oops), and in batch, 2, they were piped too large and burned on the bottom.

The oven at my parents' place is the bane of my baking existence. There are six different settings that permute whether the heat is from top or bottom or a fan is involved, and somehow, none of them seem right for whatever I'm baking. Here, the primary issue I had was that the bottom of the choux would burn, but the tops still seemed eggy and would deflate when removed from the oven. Placing the sheet on the topmost rack helped somewhat but not enough, and I resorted to poking holes in the sides of the puffs as fast as I could after removing them from the oven, to prevent the hot air in the puff from pulling a vacuum and collapsing them as they cooled. 

I sprinkled the final batch of puffs with some powdered sugar and tucked them into a bowl lined with a cute towel to present at the picnic. They were well received, particularly by our toddler guest who was seldom seen that afternoon without a puff in each hand.

A warm bundle of chouquettes au craquelin, dusted with powdered sugar. The lumps in the brown sugar caused unsightly brown splotches in the craquelin

2. Macarons with French meringue. Now, you may recall from my previous two posts that I was having some...issues with macarons, in various places. I thought for sure that a combination of not having any form of electric mixer and the stressfull oven configuration would make macarons a non-starter in this kitchen. 

But my mother asked for me to make something for her to bring into the office. I knew she had many French colleagues. Never underestimate my ability to muster up a flex for the sake of my ego. 

I made a French meringue by hand (taking several breaks to rest my right arm, in total it took about fifteen minutes to get the egg whites stiff enough). I was pleasantly surprised that the macaronage was a lot easier with the less-stable French meringue, and I was able to get to the Figure-8 consistency easily (the batter falls from the spatula that you are able to draw a figure eight with it as it drops onto the batter mass, and the figure incorporates back into the batter within ten seconds). This consistency also had the effect of not leaving any tips that needed flattening! 

I was actually inspired to make these using a recipe I found posted on instagram by Antonio Bachour. The recipe called for a surprisingly low baking temperature of 135C/275F with convection, which is lower than I've seen anywhere, and a baking time of 12-14mins. But, given the oven's propensity for burning the bottom of things, I decided to give it a shot. 

I was...surprised and kind of annoyed when they turned out absolutely beautiful. The macarons were smooth with tall feet (even though I didn't have a sifter for the almond flour) and there were extremely few bubbles. The shapes were kind of oblong since I did not have a template, but they turned out otherwise fantastic.

Beautiful tray of French meringue macarons (though the food coloring was not meant to be baked and turned brown instead of staying pink)

And, most tellingly, they were not hollow in the least. The bubbles were a little large, but the lack of a hollow made me think my macaronage was finally correct.

Full macaron shell with no hollowness, though the bubbles could be a little finer

I filled them with a raspberry white-chocolate ganache, chilled them overnight, and sent them off with my mother to the office. I was told that there were barely enough for everyone to get two, and I was showered by compliments via text. Not bad for a blind attempt guided only by hubris and a mysterious Instagram recipe!

Macarons filled with raspberry ganache to impress my mom's french colleagues

3. Having said that, the secret difficulty in baking in a foreign country reared its head with the next recipe. I found a silicone mold at a garage sale and thought I'd try a sneaky attempt at the next part of the pastry journey, mousse cakes and entremets. But I made a grave error when buying cream, and, instead of getting shelf-stable heavy cream, somehow managed to pick up Qimiq, which I did not realize was actually a type of half-cream with gelatin added. After a solid fifteen minutes of whipping with no discernable change in volume, I ended up pouring them into molds anyways with a fresh raspberry insert, and I stuck them in the freezer while I made the dacquoise. 

The dacquoise, which was another painful session of whisking egg whites to a meringue, came out interesting. Perhaps the recipe or my whipping was off, but the final texture was oddly crackly on the outside and moist (but cooked!) on the inside, and generally the cake was extremely sweet and falling apart too easily. And finally, the glaze was entirely not thick enough and slid off of the frozen mousses. The final cakes ended up kind of like creamy jello shots, but the acidity of the raspberry was a great counterpoint to the white chocolate cream and the sugary dacquoise. My parents enjoyed them, but I couldn't get over the fact that they were so far off from what they should have been.

Weird raspberry cream gelatin hazelnut dacquoise thingy

4. So I tried again! This time, I decided to do a blueberry compote insert, but without a smaller set of molds, I froze the compote and cut out little circles of it to stick into the lemon mousse (which I whipped by hand; it's been a while since I whipped cream by hand, and I forget just how quickly the soft-peak to stiff-peak transition happens and I almost overwhipped it!). I prepared a lemon genoise sponge with a sabayon base because I did not want to risk another weird meringue situation happening with the cake, and I cut them out and brushed them with Cocchi Americano before popping them into the mouse molds after the blueberry. I ended up overfilling the molds a bit, which made the glaze look really messy around the bases, but at least the glaze stayed on the cakes this time! I slipped them onto round lemon shortbreads and let them set in the fridge.

Lemon blueberry entremets

 Because I made these entremets right before leaving, I didn't actually get a chance to eat any of them (cries), but my parents assured me they made short work of them, bringing some to appreciative neighbors and eating plenty themselves. Here's a cross-section cut from my dad, to whom I taught the knife-dipped-in-hot-water trick, for a clean cut. You can see the top of the mousse is a little thick, and the cake in general is too thick for the height of the entremet, but for a recipe cobbled together with a single mold and a few circle cutters, I'm not too displeased! 

Lemon mousse, blueberry compote, lemon genoise, cocchi americano, lemon shortbread, white chocolate mirror glaze

 I don't have a lot of notes here because there were so many variables and sub-ideal conditions that I can't really replicate or dissect what happened, especially since a lot of these recipes were different than the ones I've been working on, but I'm pleased for my ability to tweak the chouquettes, figure out the right accomodations for the macarons, and improve on my entremet attempt on the fly. I think these last few months of pastry have been paying off; my intuition and ability to troubleshoot are getting better.