Patisserie 8: St Honore Cake/Gâteau St. Honoré

 So, I'm a little early on this because St. Honoré’s feast day is on May 16, but this seemed like a good recipe to try due to my previous logic that a lot of good fruit ingredients are not in season yet, I had a small amount of puff pastry still left from my first batch, and this "cake" is more like a composition of puff pastry, choux pastry, and caramelized sugar, filled with pastry cream, and thus a good bridge as I transition from making small pastries into the cakes. 

St Honore is the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs, who did some miracles in French lore, and this cake is apt because of its composition, which showcases several french pastry basics: puff pastry/lamination, choux pastry, pastry cream, caramel, and meringue. The presentation varies, but these components are always somewhere included, and there is an additional traditional component: The St Honore piping tip. This tip is used to create the elegant waves in the Chiboust (combination pastry and meringue) cream filling, and the shape is something like a quenelle with a mohawk. After reading reviews that most people liked the medium sized 882 tip from Ateco, but not wanting to make a web order for a single piping tip, I decided to use my 3D printer to print a piping tip. 

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.

Patisserie 3.5: Puff pastry experiment

 You may recall the pear and almond cream tart from a few weeks ago, where the base was a shell of puff pastry that represented my first venture into that category of pastry. In this tart, I was disappointed that the bottom of the shell was very gummy, while the edges were flaky as expected. 

In an effort to ascertain whether the remaining 950g of the homemade puff pastry I had in the fridge was viable, I took out the 250g quarter from last time and let it thaw in the fridge overnight, with the intent of running a mini experiment on this piece of dough. I had a few different things I wanted to try on this pastry: 

• Bake a piece on its own to figure out whether the lamination itself was a failure to create layers, and thus, whether the remainder of the batch could be used in other recipes
  
• Be more gentle in rolling out, letting the dough rest if it was starting to stretch
• Keep my workstation colder and not roll out a delicate butter pastry on top of a hot dishwasher counter
• Flour my cutting board so any stretching/sticking would be an immediately obvious sign to stop rolling and let the dough rest/chill

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.