That's funny... They don't look like little cabbages to me.

When I got to work today, I found a requisition for baked goods to feed 200. It didn't matter what the baked goods were, but my instructions were specific in that they said to "show off". Who am I to refuse such a request?

Among other various petite fours, I made a great variety of eclairs and cream puffs including a flock of 56 swans. The ones you see above were actually from a function in December... I just forgot my camera today. I don't know why I do it, but it seems any time it's up to me to choose something to make for a function, it involves pâte à choux, which translates to cabbage pastry in English. It's not that the dough smells of cabbage, but that's maybe kind of what it resembles if you pipe it out into rounds after baking. Yeah.... I don't know. Most people just call it eclair paste.

Anyway, I guess I do it because I've done it enough that I know what the results will be, and it looks classier than butter tarts. Gosh is it ever labor intensive though, doubly so when it's piped, cut, and then reassembled into swans afterword.

There's a million recipes floating around for eclair paste, and is a standard in most baking cook books. I feel it kind of redundant to repost it here. If you're really stuck, this one is as traditional and accurate as it gets.

So, I actually formed blisters on my hand from incorporating the 18 eggs one at a time into the 8 pounds of clay-like batter.... manually.... with a wooden spoon. Yes I complained the whole time, but that's just the relationship I have with choux paste, and it's how I know it will turn out. It has to hurt.

I used pastry cream to fill the small round shells I made, and then drizzled them with tempered chocolate. For the swans, I made a white chocolate German butter-cream filling, simply by mixing regular white chocolate butter-cream and vanilla pastry cream together. And it was good.

But I digress. Once you know eclair paste, and especially if you also know pastry cream the showing off comes all to easily, and people are quicker to be amazed than one might expect. The compliments far outweigh the blistered fingers. :-)

Something Important

When you learn to cook, it is discovered that most of the thousands of sauces in the world are derivatives of several mother sauces (tomato, bechemel, espangole, veloute, etc...) The same idea holds true in baking, and what I want to discuss today is the mother of baking mother sauces:

Pastry Cream
(dust off your baker's scales, this is a classic recipe that depends on weight, not volume)

• 480 g sugar
• 2 L milk
• 8 egg yolks
• 4 whole eggs
• 150 g cornstarch
• 120 g butter
• 30 mL vanilla
  

Method:

1. In a heavy saucepan, dissolve half the sugar in the milk and bring just to a boil.
2. With a whip, beat the egg yolks and whole eggs in a stainless-steel bowl.
3. Sift the starch and remaining sugar into the egg. Beat with the whip until perfectly smooth.
4. Temper the egg mixture by slowly beating in the hot milk in a thin stream.
5. Return the mixture to the heat and bring to a boil, stirring constantly.
6. When the mixture comes to a boil while stirring, remove from the heat.
7. Stir in the butter and vanilla. Mix until the butter is melted and completely blended in.
8. Cool quickly in a shallow pan* and whisk before using.

*note that plastic wrap should be put down directly on surface of pastry cream to prevent a skin from forming and also inhibit bacteria growth.

This stuff is wonderfully versatile. It forms the base of many cream pies, puddings, donut and cake fillings, eclair fillings. It's important to know how to make this stuff.

Oh, and also... when you get to step #5, it's important to note that this stuff is like napalm. If you stop stirring for even a moment it will splatter, stick to your skin, and burn through 2 layers of skin at least. Not to scare you away or anything, just be cautious. I know these things because I've been there.

In other news, I got a new tool box today for my portable kitchen!





$27.97 at Canadian Tire - I'd link to the item on their website but it's not listed there. I'm quite impressed with the thing. It's large enough to hold a full sized text book plus my thousands of baking/cooking, yet it's small enough to stand upright in a locker. It's like the TARDIS of tool boxes.

Consequently, the book shown above is the source of the pastry cream recipe I shared this evening. It's sort of become my baking bible.