Paris-Brest!
You might call it vanity, but I am not ashamed to say how insanely proud of these Paris-Brest I am! My first attempt at a patisserie style bake, and I'm very happy with the finished results!
 |
| The final Paris-Brest with a creme mousseline filling! |
Now, on to my method. I actually had three attempts at these so I could practice different pastry creams to use as fillings. There are a few components to this bake, but on all three attempts I used the same recipe and method for the choux pastry rings, so we'll start there.
Before making these Paris-Brest I hadn't had a go at choux pastry for many years. My last attempt might have been some rather rough looking profiteroles when I was still in high school, but it's been so long I genuinely can't remember. It was such a pleasant surprise then when the pastry was very easy to make and shape. By simply heating milk, water, butter, sugar and salt in a pan until boiling, and then quickly adding flour, you create a thick dough. By gradually adding eggs to the dough, you create a silky-smooth choux pastry. This pastry is then piped into rings, covered with a ring of craquelin, and baked!
 |
| The baked choux pastry rings cut in half! |
I almost forgot about the craquelin, as it's so simple. By combining butter, sugar, flour and salt into quite a dry dough and rolling it out very thinly, 1-2 millimeters at most, you can stamp out rings to place on top of the piped choux pastry rings. Easy, but what it does for the texture of this bake is amazing!
Having baked the choux pastry. It was on to preparing the hazelnut praline creme diplomat. A creme diplomat is simply a creme pâtissier with whipped double cream folded in. To make a creme pâtissier, hot milk (and sometimes double cream as well) is combined with egg yolks, sugar, and cornflour, and is cooked over a low heat until the resulting custard is smooth and thick. Cubed butter, and in this case dark chocolate, is then added to the still hot custard to complete the creme pâtissier.
When it came to folding in the whipped double cream and blitzed up hazelnut praline into the cooled creme pâtissier to produce a creme diplomat, things started to go south. It could have been that I wasn't gentle enough when it came to the folding, or perhaps that I hadn't cooked the custard for long enough, but the resulting creme diplomat was too thin. When I tried to pipe the filling in layers on to the choux pastry, it was not thick enough to stand up and collapsed, meaning the finished Paris-Brest lacked height. It had been going so well up until this point as well!
 |
| My first attempt... if you look closely you can probably see a the runny creme diplomat, but the pastry has no height to it at all... |
Another attempt at creme diplomat yielded a similar result, and, after doing some research I discovered that a creme mousseline is the traditional and more suitable filling for Paris-Brest anyway. A creme mousseline is another type of pastry cream, and is produced by adding whipped butter, and often gelatin into a creme pâtissier. So, I began again with my third attempt at a creme pâtissier, this time adding bloomed gelatin powder and dark chocolate in the final step, but leaving out the cubed butter. Once cooled to room temperature, the whipped butter can either be whisked or blended into the creme pâtissier, producing a finished creme mousseline!
When it came to piping the creme mousseline in place of the creme diplomat, the result was much more impressive! I was able to pipe two or three layers of the creme mousseline onto the choux pastry to both give some height to the finished pastry and show off my fillings!
I felt as though I needed a challenge, and these Paris-Brest were certainly that! I know I'm far from mastering any of the pastry creams I attempted here, and as ever my finish bakes are lacking a certain finesse... but I'm a home baker and an amateur (and proudly so!), and for me to produce something of this quality is really something to be proud of!
Something I realised only after I'd finished baking for the day is that I should have taken photos of the different custards at their various stages to add a bit of variety to my blog posts. The problem is my photography skills aren't the best, and whilst preparing custards and caramels I don't have a spare hand to hold my phone... maybe I should invest in a tripod sometime soon...
Gibby x
Comments
Post a Comment