âteau St Honore I let my boyfriend pick out any dessert he wanted for Valentine’s Day. When I said to him “what’s your favourite dessert?” I kind of expected strawberry shortcake or apple pie. Or bread pudding. How Gabout my specialty, apple streudel cheesecake? I was thinking he’d settle for a nice IGA store-bought Black Forest Cake. No such luck. After searching the web a bit, he finds a link to a fancy cake – Gateau St Honore – apparently something from his French Canadian child- hood (why then is it that I can only find a recipe for it on an Austral- ian website?). The recipe he picks looks impossible on the UKTV Food website, especially with the British/Australian measurements and descrip- tions. So I set about rec- reating the recipe using my own cookbooks, pull- ing in bits and pieces from sources I trusted. As this recipe is clearly complicated, and the future of my relationship relies on its success – it is our first Valentine’s Day together, after all, and I was (OK, I still am) in super-impress mode – I decided to break the recipe into stages, and to make stage one (the puff pastry) in January. I wanted to be sure that I could pull it off. I had relative faith in my ability to make a cake, a custard, and to whip cream. But could I make puff pastry? Choux pastry? Are they even the same thing? 1 Really, it wasn’t long after Christmas when I’m seated at the dining room table with a glass of red wine, five different cookbooks spread around me. I start reading about puff pastry. The recipes are virtually identical. Apparently if you do it right, the little bundles of raw dough will bake up nice and light and HOLLOW, which makes them perfect for filling up with good stuff. For my trial run of phase one puff pastry making, I decide to go with the Julia Child cookbook, the only one of the five recipes that was slightly different in terms of its ingredients. It contains 1⁄4 cup less flour, thus giving it a higher flour-to-egg ratio than the others. I thought, “I’m sure Julia’s the one, she’s the one, she’s got it figured out.” I make Julia’s recipe, and really she has such a lovely writing style, I couldn’t help but believe that I would create an absolutely beautiful work of art. Here’s what she says: You cannot fail with puff shells – as mounds of pâte à choux puff and brown automatically in a hot oven – if you take the proper final measures to insure the shells remain crisp. A perfect puff is firm to the touch, tender and dry to the taste. Hot puffs will seem perfectly cooked when taken from the oven, but … there is always an uncooked center portion… large puffs are split, and often their uncooked centers are removed. This is actually the only secret to puff making [emphasis added]. (pp. 177-178) Did you catch that? Part of it will be uncooked. Let me describe what it really looks like. I’ve spent the time cooking these things, and when they’re done, I open up each one while they’re still hot. Inside there’s a lump of uncooked batter that smells suspiciously (very strongly) of eggs. It resembles scram- bled eggs in fact. (1) Scraped out big shells 2 3 So I diligently scrape out the scrambled eggs, as she says I will have to. I scrape it with my fingers, from each and every puff (1). It’s disgusting. It is so grim, in fact, that we eat a few of them and throw the rest of the batch in the garbage. I call my mother long distance. My mother is prickly, and can be difficult to deal with. One area where I can generally talk to her (and not get into an argu- ment) is on the subject of food. She’s a decent cook. She has 20 years more cooking experience than I do. She’s from the south shore of Nova Scotia, so she’s got this “easier is better than harder, don’t reinvent the wheel” mindset. Mother says: “use the recipe in the Purity flour cook book.” She always says this. When in doubt, use this book. It’s like my grandmother, who says “put a little ozonol on it,” like that’ll solve all problems. Rash, heartburn, broken arm. Well, if you’re my mother (let’s call her Sherri, since that is her name), well if you’re Sherri, you use the Purity cook book to solve all of life’s problems. I try to argue with her that the four remaining recipes I have (including Purity) are identical – all included more flour than Julia (therefore the batter would arguably be less eggy). And I figured if I made the puffs smaller the second time, I’d solve the scrambled-eggs-centre problem. But Sherri is insistent that the Purity cook book is old fashioned and therefore more reliable. What about my collected Gourmet edition I’d gotten for Christ- mas (from my step-mother, did that make it automatically suspect)? What about the new edition of the Joy of Cooking? No, Sherri says, stick with Purity. She then says something snarky like “I’ve made almost every recipe in that book, including the pickles. And every one has worked out.” Doesn’t that sound like a challenge? Maybe I need to take a page from The Julie/Julia Project and make every recipe in the Purity Flour Cook Book just to see if my mother might be exaggerating. Not today. I did use the Purity recipe. I’m sure it’s the same as the Joy of Cooking or Gour- met. But really, I had to do what my mother told me to. I might be 39, but I’m not stupid. She’s a baker chick, also, and she’s too tough to mess with. 2 3 Cream Puffs 1⁄2 cup butter 1 cup water 1 cup all purpose flour 1⁄4 teaspoon salt 4 eggs In a saucepan, combine butter and water and bring to a boil. All at once, beat in the flour and salt (2). Continue cooking, mixing hard by hand with a wooden spoon, until mixture leaves the sides of the pan (3). Remove from heat and let it cool slightly. Add eggs, one at a time, beat- ing well by hand to mix the (2) Dough starts off looking like nothing eggs in. The fourth egg will from the sides of the pan take a bit of time to blend in fully. Put the warm dough in a pastry bag and then put the bag in the fridge and let it chill a bit. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 375°F. Grease a baking sheet. Using the pastry bag (or two spoons will also work if you don’t feel like spending $15 on a pastry bag you’ll have to wash out every time you use (3) As it cooks, it will come together and it), place quite small mounds pull away from the sides of the pan 4 of batter about 2 inches apart 5 on a greased baking sheet (4). Wet your finger and smooth out any points or awkward corners. Bake at 375°F for 25 to 30 minutes, or until light and golden. Poke each backed puff with a chopstick or other suitable instrument (to make a hole for steam to escape, and this will also be the same hole you use later to fill the puffs once they’re cooled). Leave the puffs on the tray, put them back in the oven (which you’ve now turned off), and let dry 30 minutes in the oven. Remove and set aside to cool completely. Makes 3 dozen small puffs. You’ll only need 12 for this recipe. Apparently you can freeze both the uncooked batter and/or the cooked puffs. And while this seems like it might work, I saved the uncooked batter for a few days and then just threw it out as I was uninspired. (4) These are the Julia-large size... make yours smaller 4 5 Sponge cake flan base 2 eggs (at room temperature) 2/3 cup white sugar 1/3 cup warm water 1 teaspoon vanilla [or 1⁄2 teaspoon vanilla + 1⁄2 teaspoon lemon extract] 1 cup all purpose flour 2 teaspoons baking powder [11⁄2 teaspoons finely grated lemon rind, optional] pinch of salt Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease 11 inch flan pan with raised centre. Dust with flour; place a round of parchment or waxed paper in the raised centre. In a bowl and using an electric mixer, beat eggs, sugar and water for 10 min- utes or until batter leaves a ribbon trail when beaters are lifted (this never hap- pens for me, so I just set the timer for 10 minutes, beat, and move on). Blend in vanilla. Stir together flour, baking powder and salt; soft half of flour mixture over egg mixture and fold in with a spatula until blended. Repeat with remaining flour mixture. Try not to beat it very hard, just until the ingredients are well mixed. Pour batter into pan and spread evenly to edge. Bake for 20 to 30 minutes, or until the top springs back lightly when touched. Let cool in the pan for 5 min- utes. Loosen edges and invert onto a wire rack.