Handcrafted Happiness: Choux + Caramel = Glorious Pastries

Oh what a day. Yesterday's morning was....rough. It began with me turning on the burner I thought the tea pot was on, but instead, turning on the burner beneath the enamel coated colander. Now, this is where I learned the first important lesson. It's probably not best to let your pots and pans dry on the stove over night. But! This gets tricky when you only have 7"x18" of counter space. So, I usually let my pots and pans dry on the stove. But, I also happened to let my cute little teal colander dry there too one night. (At least I've never left towels on the stove). So, in about a minute and a half, of sitting on the wrong burner, the colander essentially turned to ash. Pretty instantly. And set the smoke detector off (make sure to keep those smoke detectors working!) And this is all before I've had my morning coffee. The day ended in me coming home to a kitchen full of ash. And having to wear a mask to keep the ash out of my lungs. Not an awesome start to the day. So, I headed off to school, where we continued to working with Choux dough. The morning was going fine, I had done some nice piping, made a good caramel, and was ready for lunch. Where I proceeded to drop my hamburger, and plate on the floor of the student lounge. Which resulted in a sad hamburger, and a lot of shattered porcelain. But, a really nice student in the level ahead of us helped me clean it up. So sweet.

During these various disasters, we were working on the St. Honore Cake, which combines a pastry cream, stabilized with gelatin, and folded into an Italian Meringue, layers over Choux, and finished with the caramel little cream puffs.

Named for the patron Saint of Pastries (who knew there as a saint for pastries) this is a few rings of Choux dough, piped in concentric circles (to look like the Target symbol) that is baked, and then stacked with baked cream puffs, filled with Creme Chiboust, and dipped in caramel. Then, the ring is filled with cream, and piped with this lovely special tip. This was a tricky dessert. But, it turned out okay. The filling is really tricky, because it if sits for too long, it begins to separate, so you have to make, and pipe this ring of Choux dough pretty quickly.

So, needless to say, it was a long day. But, I decided, that if you can make it home from school after a day like that, through 3 o'clock San Jose rush hour traffic without getting in an accident, and you can pipe a nice Creme Chiboust, you're doing alright. So here it is - St. Honore Cake. And one I'm pretty happy with. I think it turned out alright. Then, I went home, cleaned up a disaster, and made some homemade ricotta. Turns out, ricotta is pretty comforting. And delicious when used to fill muffins, which I brought to class the next day.

We also made Gougeres, which are lovingly referred to as "Cheesy Puffs" around school. There are Choux dough, mixed with Parmesan, Gruyere, Paprika and Cayenne, then baked unti puffy, and toasty cheesy. They make a delicious snack, and I even managed to lift up my face mask, and pop a few in my mouth while cleaning up ash. They made the afternoon quite a bit better.

Today! Glad to have yesterday over and done with, to start again on a new day. Which turned out to be quite a pleasant day. Today, we made croquembouche, which is the super traditional wedding cake of France. After class, we were discussing them with Chef Bruno, one of the Culinary chefs, who was born and raised in the Northern part of France, and he said the French use this dessert for nearly everything, from weddings, to baptisms, (he said "baptismes"), family reunions and birthdays. This was a really fun, quite relaxing day, of piping little rounds of Choux, dipping them in caramel, and assembling them into a cone shape. This cone shape is deceptively hard to achieve too. It's definitely an exercise in thinking ahead, and using small incremental changes to create a big-picture finished product.

Then, after class, we had a guest chef-demo with Matt Greco, the executive chef at Wente Vineyards up in the valley. We sat, drank wine from the vineyards, ate from a charcuterie platter he brought (Wente raises their own beef), and watched as he prepared an appetizer of clams and chorizo over homemade croutons. Then, at the end, a friend of mine snuck up through the crowds, and managed to snag the last little piece of charcuterie for me, as a surprise. Today was a better day.

Something fun about the Croquembouche - meaning "crack in the mouth" - is that each turns out to be really indicative of the person who made it.

Here's mine - very classic. Very, very classic.

The decorations were intended to look like branches, although they may look more like sea coral than branches. When you look at it, just imagine branches. But I didn't dip my little cream puffs in any sort of topping. I think the deep amber caramel is really beautiful, so I stuck to that.

But some of my class mates turned out really cool - here they are.

The green is pistachios, the brown is cocoa nibs, the white is pearl sugar, and then he also has some with almonds. All the extra decorations are extra Choux dough, piped.

The blue is coconut, mixed with food coloring in the food processor.

This one has a bird, and the other has the "ICC", which stands for The International Culinary Center. It was really an exciting day for Pastry 1 students - this was our first project to be displayed in the hallway. Since we had the Wente Vineyards chef demo today, there were lots of people roaming the halls this afternoon, who got to take a look at the finished products.

This is the whole table lined up..