Thursday, June 17, 2010

Day 35

Ok, so it's been forever since I posted and I'm sorry!  For a while there it was hard to post since I didn't have a computer and then I was so far behind I didn't want to spend the time to catch up.  UGGGGGH!  Anywho, here we go!

So for the last week of Term 1, we did lots of fun stuff.  On Monday, we did fun things with pate a choux (pot a shoe).  What, you ask, is pate a choux?  It is a dough made from flour and water and eggs which has nearly no flavor on its own, so it's great for making little tasty things that have some kind of cream or flavoring that you want to highlight.  It's kind of funny to make since you boil the liquids (butter, sugar and water), then add the flour and stir it until it forms a ball and leaves a film on the bottom of the pan then take it off and put it in a mixer and add the eggs until it's loose enough to put in a pastry bag and pipe out.  From there you can do all kinds of shapes and when it is baked it gets hard and hollow and can be cut all different ways and filled.

First up was one of my favorite treats...


Cream puffs!

They are just little balls of pate a choux cut open and filled with cream chantilly (crem chantee-yee) then sprinkled with powdered sugar.

We also made eclairs, which were fun.  Again, just pate a choux piped and baked but then filled with pastry cream and topped with fondant.


Hmm, hopefully I will be getting better at the designs....

The other thing we did with the pate a choux was something called a paris-brest.  Now, I've never heard of them, but I have to say that it was tasty.  This will also give you an idea of what the pate a choux looks like before it's baked vs. after.


These are piped out with a star-tip and covered in almond slices before baking


When they're done, they get cut open, filled with hazelnut chiboust (pastry cream with Italian Meringue in it) and sprinkled with powdered sugar.

I think that about does it for pate a choux.  It's a fun substance and I'm sure something that I will be working with in the future...I mean, what's life without cream puffs and eclairs???

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