I suppose that I'm a Brest Man

Yesterday was another Pâtisserie day. Ooh la la.

So the main objectives of the afternoon were to create éclairs et une gâteau Paris Brest. Of course nothing in Pâtisserie is ever really simple. You don't just bake these babies...you have to bake one piece, make a mousseline to fill it with, make a fondant to coat it with, etc. Lots of steps and sub-recipes. To make a mousseline, you add butter to a pastry cream (crème pâtissière)...so you have to know how to make a crème pâtissière as well.

The basic pastry dough that serves as the cake component of these recipes is called Choux. Made with water and milk, you just melt some butter in the hot liquid and add in flour - just like making a roux. Mixing this quickly with a spatula, we then mix in eggs, 1 at a time, until they're all integrated, then beat the heck out of it until it's silky and falls off the spatula in ribbons. That's it. Then you have the basis of both the cake and the eclairs.

Since this is a liquidy dough, you actually lay it out on the baking sheet by squeezing it through a pastry bag. For eclairs, all you need to do is squeeze out a simple line.

For the Paris Brest cake, you just make a single circle, plus a stack of 3 circles. The 3 circle stack gets coated with a mound of chopped almonds. Interestingly, the latter bakes up and looks like...well...a bialy. I think I just heard Chef Didier say "Oy!"

The origin of the Paris Brest cake is an interesting one. As related by Chef Didier, apparently there was a bicycle race from the city of Paris to the city of Brest, in the Northwest, in 1894. Along the route was a patisserie, owned by an enterprising pastry chef. To commemorate the race, he invented a round cake with a wheel in its design. Et voila!

Starting with the choux pastry circles, you make a hazelnut chocolate mousseline to pipe into the hollow insides of the "wheel" and for decorating the edge of the other, triple ring. I don't think I'd ever had one of these cakes before, because I surely would have remembered it. It is extraordinarily yummy. I should note, I suppose, though, that there is so much butter in the mousseline, that Katy will surely ban this recipe from our relatively health-conscious household (we do actually cook out of Cooking Light magazine most of the time - it's not all bacon, all the time, despite my poetic waxing on the subject!).


P.S. Sorry for the crappy image quality - I forgot my new camera at the apt and had to use my low-res, flashless, Treo camera. And yep, that's my finished Paris Brest cake on the right...