Saint Honoré
Hello! How about a bit of french pastry?
I have been working in a bakery in the South of France, doing their line of pastries and goodies. The challenge has been the actual baking because I have to bake everything in a huge deck oven. It was quite daunting at first as I have always had a proper convection oven wherever I have worked. But, it is actually all right. I have been doing some tests with choux pastry lately because everything becomes enormous in that deck oven!! So, yesterday, while I was off, I made some choux pastry to test.... convention on, convection off, directly on the stone, in the middle, etc. I decided to make a Saint Honoré because it is is yummy and pretty, and I hadn't made one in ages. This type of piping is all the rage here in France these days. The base is a flattened puff pastry. I made a "princess vanilla cream", which is a vanilla pastry cream with some gelatin and butter that is cooled to room temp and then has some whipped cream folded in to it and then cooled. It becomes lighter and moussy and can be piped easily. The piped cream is a slightly sweeted (powdered sugar), vanilla mascarpone whipped cream. The choux are filled with the princess pastry cream. I had some friends over for tea and that distracted me and I glued the choux, forgetting to dip them in the caramel first. Oops! So I just drizzled the caramel on top. It sounds complicated, but it is pretty straight forwards and always a crown pleaser.