Wedding Day!

      Between picking up more shifts and helping to train a new assistant cook (my replacement - more on this later) at work, a substitute photographer and struggling with their flikr's sharing policies, this post is coming much much later than it should have.

     First and foremost - the latest selection of pastries: With my beautiful sister's wedding looming, I took my days off preparing about five kilograms of puff pastry - this time prepared by hand using a traditional European method - rather than the quick puff pastry I used for my hors d'oeuvres. Looking back on it, I enjoyed this method. It makes for a dough with better defined layers which is rather important when making a pastry that is defined by its layers. At the time, it was a nightmare to prepare, since my kitchen has no air conditioning and the week leading up to the wedding was excruciatingly hot - hardly ideal conditions for working with massive quantities of butter.

     With the puff pastry ready, I put off the rest of the pastry work until the morning before the wedding, beginning at about 1:00 am, and ending at about 10:30 am - with a break for sleep somewhere in the middle. The pastries were nice and fresh and, for the most part, looked pretty darn good.

     First off, the conversations. These used the puff pastry to form a cup that holds the apricot/orange/almond filling. Though they're supposed to be made in a very particular type of pan - the name escapes me and my book is literally miles away - I was able to make do with the right size of muffin tin as well as my ramekins. The only real difference is how difficult it is to make the pastry cups - the final product is relatively unchanged.

     The top of the pastry is finished very slightly differently from the way suggested in the book: Forming an X on the top of the pastry, rather than a square formed from 4 thinner strips of pastry. In the end, it's nothing but an aesthetic change, brought on by lack of patience and time.

     Next are the profiteroles, made with the leftover choux paste and pastry cream from various other pastries I made for the wedding. There isn't a whole lot to say about them, except that in the picture I have they remain ungarnished and unfinished.

     When they made it onto the platters at the wedding they were covered in raspberry sauce, chocolate sauce and piping cream, and looked much better than they do sitting on the baking sheet. Up until this point I have only ever had profiteroles filled with whipped cream, which is how we make them at work. I liked these far better.

     Now for the other puff pastry piece, the mille-feuille. This is a pastry defined by its layers, ideally having a thousand layers in the puff pastry - mine theoretically had just over a thousand, because of the method used to prepare the dough.

     These ended up working out pretty well, despite a couple setbacks. My icing for the top did not end up working out, so I ended up finishing them with more pastry cream and chocolate sauce, and the pastry cream itself could have been thickened more, which would have made the finished product a little more stable, and easier to just bite into.

     Finally, the piece I put together for the happy couple - Courting Swans. This pastry is actually deceptively simple to put together, though it looks incredible once plated. This is where the various sauces really had a chance to shine through.

     These could have been even easier if I had a larger star tip for my piping bag (which I have now picked up) but they still worked out, better than I had hoped in some cases. A good thing to keep in mind when making these is to make plenty of extra pieces. The necks are incredibly fragile, having extras - even if you don't use them - brings a whole lot of peace of mind.

     I should also give a big tip of the old hat to my Cousin Veronica for her excellent photography work with the wedding. If you're looking for more pictures of the pastries in various stages of being built, or pictures of the beautiful wedding, you should check out her Flikr page.

Chocolate Éclairs, etc.

     It has been quite a while now; between various holidays, having a cook resign at work and coordinating with my photographer; since I have been able to put together some pastries to post here. I had been all excited for desert pastries, and simply never got to start on them. So, without further ado: Chocolate eclairs.

     To begin, I'm not entirely happy with how these turned out. I was planning to use a large star tip to pipe them out, only to realize that my piping kit was missing some key pieces - namely the large star. I made do with what I had, but the end result was slightly misshapen pastries that were thinner than I anticipated.

     The pictured pastry was among the last to be glazed, resulting in spotty coverage due to a chocolate glaze that was running out, and nearly too thick. I was however, happy with the sheen of the glazes, both the chocolate giving off the noticeable reflections and the apricot glaze; nearly invisible, as it is mostly covered by the chocolate, but lending a reflection or two to the top of the eclair.

     Another thing worth noting is the Creme Parisienne, or chocolate whipped cream, which I built slightly differently from the recipe in the book. I had been playing around with sauces and had a ton of chocolate sauce left over. Rather than chopping new chocolate - in a food processor that I don't have - I flavored the cream with my left over chocolate sauce. In the end, the eclairs were very tasty, if not the prettiest product I've ever made. The combination of the various flavors and textures was delicious and satisfying. You can't see it, but theres strawberry jam piped into the bottom of each eclair, offsetting the cream and chocolate beautifully, and the pate a choux was indelibly crisp, despite its shape.

     Oh, also, when the recipe calls for a batch of choux paste, it actually means a small batch. I ended up making a lot of eclairs.

     There was another pastry that I put together that day, however, it's going to be surprising my wonderful sister and her soon-to-be husband at their wedding this Saturday, along with some more pastries that I am still assembling. So, I won't be posting the pictures here just yet.

     The sauces that I had been playing with were actually for that pastry, and since I had been plating it anyhow for the pictures, I ended up playing with them on the eclair plate, after it had been consumed.

     The random hearts pattern has always been one of my favorites, and in the interest of not having only one thing pictured here until next week, I decided to include it.

     Hope you enjoyed this. Congratulations again to Jana and Ollie, my beautiful sister, soon-to-be brother, and friends.