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 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.