Daring Bakers - Challenge FOUR!

And the challenge for August is ... *drum roll* ... Eclairs!

This month's challenge is Chocolate Eclairs, a Pierre Hermé recipe (GASP!) from Dorie Greenspan's book "Chocolate Desserts By Pierre Hermé" sexily hosted by Tony Tahhan and MeetaK.

You guys are in for a treat today! HEHEHE! Happy Ahmad had a lot of fun with this challenge. Especially with the photography too! I'm getting much better with lighting and whatnot and as you shall see, the pictures in this episode of The Daring Baker are probably the best I've done so far. This time around I'll not try to talk to much and let the pictures do the narration.

Anyway, time for obligatory background check, eclairs are basically choux pastry (read: shoo pastry) filled with a filling, in this case chocolate pastry cream, and optionally topped with chocolate glaze. Choux pastry is so easy to make, and its so amazing too since it puffs up insanely much using only its own steam (no baking powder! GASP.) Pate a choux, as it is also called, can go from this ...

... to this ...

... with only heat! Brilliant isn't it!? ^_^;;

But before you make your pastry shells, old experienced me suggests you make your filling first (especially if it is a pastry creme, since they need time to chill) to save yourself lots of heartache and frustration. Especially if your DAMN F*#%IN$ PASTRIES KEEP FREAKIN' COLLAPSING *Bashes head against counter-top*.

Ahem. Moving along.

Making Your Chocolate Pastry Cream:

The base of a good pastry cream is good fresh milk.

Stir continuously until it reaches a boil. Supposedly a "rolling boil" but I have no idea what that means. *Shrug*. Do you like my cool nifty whisk gadget? IKEA!

On the side, break some eggs and steal their yolks.

Throw some cornflour over them to stop their complaining.

Oooo! Pretty close up shot!

I should at this point in time, despite you having so much fun violating your eggs, remind you to keep stirring your milk, lest you end up with a nasty skin layer. Which has to be manually removed, and ends up looking ...

... slightly disturbing.

Whisk the egg yolks, and add them to the milk ...

... whisking continuously until ...

... it becomes thick and creamy-licious. Mmmm!

Melt your dark chocolate and pour it in (with one hand and camera in the other hand. Haha. My camera ended up so sticky by the end of this.)

Stir, then add soft butter...

Stir stir stir somemore and then you get the most delicious chocolate cream filling EVER. It's SO GOOD. I kept eating it with a spoon even though I hadn't even made my eclairs yet! Haha.

Be sure to chill. It's way tastier cold. Well, I think anyway.

Now for Step TWO!

Making Your Choux Pastry:

Melt your butter in your milky-water as quickly as possible to avoid water loss. Once I even melted my butter in the microwave and poured it in the milky-water. It was a good idea I think.

Then add your flour ALL at ONCE in one great floury flourish!

Stir over low heat until it gathers into a ball and unsticks from the sides. This little guy needs a bit more drying. Not quite together yet.

Add your eggs one at a time (LOL I really should practise what I preach haha) and use a mixer (or if your a masochist use a wooden spoon) until it becomes smooth. Here's where choux pastry gets a bit tricky. Because chickens are weird and can't make perfectly identical eggs all the time, you might not need all of the egg. You kind of need to make a judgement about how thick you want your pastry to be. I like to think the ideal point is where it can be piped and hold its shape with only slight drooping. But then again, I usually make things up as I go along.

Love this picture. And there you have your "dough".

Part Three!

Baking Your Shells:

By this point, I had generally made the recipe about 6 times (no exaggeration) and so besides knowing the recipe off by heart, I felt like experimenting with different shapes to see what kind of results I got. The first is with spoons, the second a regular pipe, and the third is a squiggly sort of shape I saw in some video on the internet. And the results are...

Wow. Fat. LOL!

Damn top heating element. Keeps burning all my crap! Never fear happy people, I bought a new oven and it's coming soon! Weee! The top heating element actually made the things crispier, which I really liked.

I cut them in half and glazed their tops.

And last but not least...

The Result!

I love how this looks. But even more, the taste is amazing.

Full-frontal shot.

I tried my hand at desert plating. Looked cute, but I think I'm not quite there yet.

Extra Fun:

I've been dying to try my hand at making a Paris Brest since forever and I thought this was the perfect opportunity. Lots of leftoever choux! What to do!? That rhymed. By the way.

Hot, no?

*Phew*. That was fun. Now I have to go wash the damn dishes. My silly FAT family keeps eating all my food and never helps me clean up!

Food Review: Cupcakes on Pitt!

Cuppy cakes cuppy cakes cup cup a'cuppa CAKE! Let's all sing the cupcake song! After uni today (MATH1151 tutorial ARGH) I had THE STRONGEST cravings for cupcakes. I was meant to take the train straight from Central back home but I was like stuff this and took the 394 bus to Pitt St @ Town Hall.

Straight to Cupcakes on Pitt!!

[Link]

A Young Foodie's Short Review:

Seeing as how cupcakes, mini-cakes, baby-cakes and all that sorta stuff is all the rage in Sydney right now I thought I might as well try it out. NOT! I JUST WALKED PASSED THE STORE BY ACCIDENT AND SAW THE PRETTIES AND HAD TO GO IN. Haha.

Well, for starters they make the best looking cupcakes out of places I've seen in real-life. Seriously pretty. They have a wide range of pretties. I bought 6 today. They're very pricey though. $2 a cupcake. Sigh. Here's the ones I bought:

The flavours I got were (starting from bottom-left going clockwise): Dark Chocolate, Pineapple Coconut, Tiramisu, Peppermint, Lemon-Meringue and Sticky Date Pudding. Now, the almighty question.

How did they TASTE!?

Well. For starters, I thought the muffin bases were a bit dry. I know! *Sob*. I didn't like how they used the same chocolate base for the tiramisu, the peppermint and the dark chocolate. They were all very dry. The peppermint was probably the worst. The buttercream on top was so fugly, and the mint flavour was too light. Almost bland. Tiramisu was nicer, still dry, but the coffee buttercream was much nicer.

The dark chocolate was nice. The moist ganache off-put the dryness of the muffin base so as long as I took big munches it was good. The coconut pineapple was quite nice. I'm very partial to pineapple so I might be a bit biased. The dessicated coconut pieces were a bit big and poking out everywhere. Not a nice feeling in your mouth, but very tasty.

Now for the big hitters. Sticky date was just DELICIOUS. The muffin was so moist (they didn't use the lame basic choc or vanilla base) and had bits of dates in it. YUM! And the caramel icing was so good. I microwaved it for a bit and it was so warm and good! Lemon meringue was also so very amazingly delicious. They used a vanilla cupcake base, but the core was dug out and filled with the lemon curd. It was so good. It's my favourite one!! Here's a close-up:

I'm not gonna do some out-of-10 kinda thing as it's so tacky. So, all in all, a nice experience. Not to mention I almost got hit by a truck crossing the road in peak-hour frenzy traffic to get there. Do give the place a visit! The service is very good and follow my cupcake recommendations and you should leave as a happy fellow.

Ciao!

Croissants...

Made croissants for the first time ever. It's summer now in Sydney so sleeping tends to evade me a little bit more; hence my staying up and baking goodies. I've always avoided baking yeast-based breads (especially laminated-dough sorts of things like croissants) because they're a bit intimidating for a not-so-experienced baker like me. But I thought ah wtf it's boiling and I'm bored, might as well do something. LoL.

Here's the dough after rising. Multiple risings, mind you. Croissants do take ages to make. But seriously (I know it sounds oh so cliche) but even for noobs like me the flavour you get out of freshly baked croissants (the smell and the buttery crispness) makes it so worth it. Here's a quick summary of how to make croissants. Do bear with the jumbled nonsense; I'm kinda tired and I did sorta make up the recipe on the spot. So here's what you do:

Put 2 sachets of yeast in a large bowl with about a cup of lukewarm water and 3 tablespoons of white sugar. Mix and let it sit for 15 minutes till it develops a foamy layer (kinda like cheap coffee from a machine). Then add a pinch of salt and stir the mixture. Now for the guessy bit. Using a wooden spoon mix plain white flour into the mixture until you get a gloopy mess. Keep adding flour until it becomes a pliable dough and then knead it until it's nice and smooth. It will take ages. Don't be afraid to keep adding flour. Leave dough in a bowl and cover with a wet cloth and let rise for about an hour until double in volume. While you're waiting, get a block of butter (250g) and use a rolling pin to flatten it into a rectangle about 1-2 cm thick. Refrigerate it. Get the dough, punch out all the air and roll it into a rectangle 3 times the size of the butter. Put the butter in the middle and wrap it in dough ("laminate"). Roll out the dough and keep folding it over and over so you get heaps of layers (which makes it a fluffy bread) but make sure no butter leaks out. It will get funky so keep putting it back in fridge every now and then. Then roll it out, cut into triangles, roll into croissant shapes and let it rise for about 45 min. Bake for 12-15 minutes in a moderate oven (180-190 degrees Celsius).

I hope that made sense. If you did it correctly you should get something delicious like this! YUM. The butter will leak out like crazy, but then the dough will absorb it. Not something you'd wanna eat everyday. LOL. Also, I stuffed a few of them with chocolate. Bad boy.

Enjoy!

Max Brenner (FINALLY!!)

So. Finally, after months (literally) of nagging, my family finally agreed to take me to the very famous Max Brenner's Chocolate Cafe. Chocolate by the Bald Man. Not exactly an appetising slogan, but who cares!? The moment I walked into the Parramatta cafe and saw the huge vats of swirling metal molten chocolate I was a stark raving lunatic screaming to dig into some waffles! FEED ME!!

I was kinda sizing out the place and comparing it to Sydney's other famous chocolate joint, Lindt Cafe (which I have also been to). Mind you, I'm heavily biased towards Lindt, since it just sounds so much cooler, and has that prestigious air, like it's an aristocratic establishment (it's also kewl that Lindt invented conching, although serendipitously...)

ANYWAY.

The Max Brenner place was kinda, er, dark. As in really dark. Maybe they were trying to give it that seedy feel of a nightclub or something I dunno. It was different I suppose. It was very full too. Irrelevant details. All that is important is the FOOD.

ALL HAIL CHOCOLATE LORD.

We ordered crepes, waffles, suckao, hot chocolate, strawberries and melted chocolate (*moans*) and peanut butter milkshakes. It was SO good. I don't really want to compare it to Lindt (I can't really, I haven't tasted everything, and plus Lindt is so friggin' expensive) so I'll just describe the food in all its glories.

The strawberries were so good! They were actually sweet (I'm too used to sour supermarket strawberries.) I wonder where they get them from. And the chocolate! Just TOO good! It finished so quickly. *Sigh*...

Here's a close-up/artistic-shot. Pretty.

Here are the Tutti-Frutti Waffles (or should I say waffle.) Waffle, GODLY chocolate, bananas, those damn good strawberries again and some vanilla ice-cream. It was SO GOOD. Some people (*ahem*) say that it's better than the Lindt waffles but I don't really think so. However, I wouldn't mind someone buying both for me again so I could compare! HAHA.

Suckao. A strange Max Brenner invention. Suck + Cacao = Suckao. Capish? I didn't think it was all that great. Honestly it was kinda lame. Finished far too quickly. But the chocolate was as good as ever. Maybe just a bit over-priced. Hmmm...

And lastly, the peanut-butter milkshakes. Tasted so AMERICAN. Such a strange taste! I don't really understand the American obsession with peanut butter (yes, I do know he's an Israeli chap), but it was quite nice actually. Very heavy. We JUST finished it. Another sip and we would have POPPED.

Very happily too.