Patisserie 6: Apple Almond Danishes

 As I mentioned at the end of my post revisiting tartlets, I feel comfortable moving on from this section, but I was concerned about many of the classic cakes having dependency on berries or other soft summer fruit that was not currently in season. I am currently rolling in an abundance of apples, and I still had those cranberries from the fruit tart I made at the beginning of this month, so I have decided to wrap up this first month of patisserie with a spot of viennoiserie in the form of apple danishes with almond cream. This recipe is technically from the brioche and breakfast pastries section, but as I am pretty experienced with brioche at this point from previous projects and have done two lamination recipes this month, I felt it would be reasonable to try this recipe which combines aspects of both. 

Patisserie 5: Kouign Amann

I decided to make kouign amann because it's such popular classic pastry in recent years, for obvious reasons. I feel like this recipe was a bit of a softball, because it's hard to go wrong with something that's laminated with butter and sugar. But I have some quibbles nonetheless! 

A kouign amann (pronounced like kween a-'mann) is a type of Breton cake, with a yeasted dough that is laminated with butter and sugar and then baked until the sugar caramelizes and the combined steam from the butter and the yeast doing its thing causes the pastry to puff in layers. They're definitely delicious and definitely not good for you. But I had a suspicion I would be able to find enough people to consume the 15 pastries this recipe was going to make. 

Patisserie 3: Feuilletage/Puff pastry/Tarte aux Poires/Pear tart with almond cream

I had some pears I wanted to use, so I skipped ahead to an intermediate recipe from the holidays section for a tart with pears, dried fruits, and almond cream. The note at the very bottom of the Tarte aux Poires recipe says: "Readymade all-butter puff pastry dough can replace the homemade." Since I had yet to make any of the puff-pastry-type recipes in the tarts section, I decided to make this one from scratch, essentially turning this one recipe into three (candied orange peel being the third component I needed to make from scratch, also from the holiday section). 

Puff pastry is often used in napoleons and more traditional galettes (french open-faced tinless pies), though recently galettes have sort of fused with pie dough as a base. Puff pastry, like other laminated doughs (doughs that are folded and rolled out multiple times to create layers of butter between layers of dough, rather than creaming together sugar and butter and flour), is very reliant on keeping the dough and butter cold while working with it to minimize the amount of butter absorbed into the dough. The distinct layers then separate slightly during baking, with the steam from the butter layer helping the dough layers puff up and the fat from the butter layer gently frying the dough, achieving a bunch of flaky, crisp layers as a final result. 

To keep the dough cold and flaky, there's three common strategies, usually employed together: 

• Use cold workpieces (marble rolling pin, marble worksurface, or iced work surface)
• Use multiple days to prepare the dough, chilling well in between each folding and rolling process
• Use as little flour as possible and a cold dough to prevent sticking

There's a small fourth rule, for the final rolling out prior to baking, to be gentle and not smush or stretch the dough too much, which I failed to do well, but more on that later.