Les Gâteaux du Pâtissier: Leçon 3

Following the Great British Bake off Patisserie week semi final I decided to bite the bullet and attempt the dreaded Pâte Feuilletée or as most of us know it, Puff Pastry!!!! Now, looking back at the experience I can confidently say, I know why people just buy the ready made stuff! While I have possibly never felt so much satisfaction from a successful bake before, I have also never been so close to banging my head repeatedly against a wall over a bake before!!!

It took me three attempts - two of which ended up in the bin - and a whole lot of asking myself why I was doing this. In the end though, the unbelievable satisfaction and pride in the end result outweighed the previous hours of frustration.

I'm selling this to you really well, amn't I?!

Honestly, I'm not trying to put you off, just preparing you for what's to come if you have never tried to make pâte feuilletée before. I'll definitely be making it again!

So here we go! As I mentioned in my last post, I'm a bit of a Maverick, so I'm not going to stick to the order of the lessons!! So uncool!! Instead I'll be jumping around as the mood takes me! That's right, I'm just that wild!! Anyway, today we're hopping back from last times lesson 8 (Les Babas) to lesson 3 (La Pâte Feuilletée) and stick with the first recipe of the section - Mille feuille Belle-Hélène, consisting of three thin layers of puff pastry filled with cocoa chantilly cream and pieces of tinned pear, topped with a dusting of cocoa powder and icing sugar.

To make the pastry you need a 250g strong white bread flour (T55), 5g salt, 125ml water and 180g butter.

Firstly, prepare the butter by softening it (whacking it with a rolling pin between two pieces of greaseproof paper until its soft enough to roll out) and shaping it into a 15cm square. They suggest using a square cake tin although I wouldn't stress if you don't have one, just measure it out. The tin should be lined with cling film which is then wrapped over the butter and pop the whole thing in the fridge for an hour - or in the freezer if you have less time.

While this is cooling in the fridge take the flour and sieve it onto your baking surface, make a well in the middle and pour in the water and the salt. Next it says to use what I assume is a dough scraper (French to English translation was a bit tricky in parts) and scoop the outer flour into the middle to form a dough.

This is where things got hilarious!!!! I don't have a dough scraper so I was using a cake slice server thing instead. I began with gusto to scoop the outer flour into the middle and what do you think happened?? FLOODS!!!!! The water poured out through a gap in the flour and since this was on the kitchen counter, proceeded to flood the counter and the floor, with me desperately trying to scoop it all back in while laughing hysterically in an empty kitchen!... Thank God no one else was there!!

So, take one in the bin.

Take two:

With the butter still cooling in the fridge I started again on the flour/salt/water mix, still using the kitchen counter (you'd think I'd have learned my lesson by now! ) and scooping more gently from the outside into the centre. There was a moment of danger of another flood but I kept cool and managed to turn this one into a dough.

Here was another moment in the recipe where I got a bit confused with the translation. The book said to knead the dough but that it should remain 'lumpy'. I took this to mean it should still be a bit crumbly and not completely smooth so I only worked it enough to bring it together into a ball. I then marked a deep cross across the top of it, wrapped it in clingfilm and put it in the fridge to cool for 30 mins.

Plenty of time to try figure out the next part which involved wrapping the butter inside the pastry (like an envelope) and rolling, folding and turning it. Here, the translations got the better of me, even with the help of a real French man and I ended up having to look up a tutorial video on youtube.

The one thing I do know about the rolling and folding process (thanks to binge watching the Great British Bake Off) is that in order for this to work, the butter needs to be kept as cold as possible, otherwise it'll just seep out everywhere as you roll it out. The same goes for folding the dough around the butter in the first place - if there are any gaps the butter will go everywhere.

So, let's proceed.

After the pastry had rested long enough in the fridge I took it and the butter out. The dough was to be rolled out one quarter at a time to create a cross shape with a centre the size of the butter. I did this to the best of my ability but found that to get the correct measurements it meant the dough was very thin.

I then placed the butter in the middle and folded over the sides like an envelope, trying my best to cover the whole thing. This was then rolled out into a long rectangle, folded in three - fold the top third down and the bottom third over it - turn it a quarter roll out into another rectangle and repeat. You can dust the work surface with flour to stop it sticking but then in between each fold you have to brush off any access flour (I don't really know why). This was to be done twice, then put in the fridge to cool again and repeat the folds two more times.

It became pretty clear as I went through the first two turns that things weren't going my way. Despite dusting the surface with flour, the dough continued to stick and as I rolled, holes began to appear.

This was the result....Disaster!!!

Fail no. 2 in the bin.

Attempt no. 3:

At this stage it was taking all my Zen powers not to throw my rolling pin out the window, find myself a box of chocolates and wallow in my failure while watching something really soppy on tv.

Thankfully, I found one last morsel of determination and set about preparing the butter and dough again. This time, instead of using the counter top to mix the dough, I used a mixing bowl... much easier!!! I kneaded the dough for a little longer, not too long, just enough to make it pliable.

After cooling the butter and dough I rolled out the dough a bit thicker and cut down the butter to fit into the centre of the dough, placing the extra pieces in the centre of the butter and using the rolling pin to make into a smooth square again. This fit much better inside the dough and the sides all folded over without any gaps. I rolled it out as before, being super, extra careful about it sticking and somehow managed to get it looking like this!!!! All together I did two folds and turns, cooled it in the fridge and two more folds and turns.

Fairly happy with the results and mostly just desperate not to have to start again I then moved onto the shaping of the dough into three large, thin sheets, ideally to the diameters of 40 x 30cm. As you can see mine didn't turn out quite as neat and square as the ones in the book and I also found it hard to roll it out that big without it going too thin, but sure who really needs perfectly rectangle sheets of puff pastry unless you're working in a bakery or professional kitchen. At home 'informal' will do just fine!!

To bake the pastry sheets, line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper and place one of the pastries on top. Cover with another sheet of greaseproof paper and place a second baking tray on top. Bake at 180 degrees celsius for 12 min.

Meanwhile, make a glaze by mixing together 60g icing sugar and 3 teaspoons of water. When the 12 mins are up, take off the top baking tray and greaseproof paper, brush the pastry with the sugar glaze and return to the oven, uncovered, for 8 more mins until golden and puffed up a bit.

Once you have baked all three sheets, set them aside to cool completely - at least 20 mins.

Now comes the fun/terrifying part!! Cutting the pastry sheets into identical rectangles. The recipe says it makes 6 but we didn't need that many so I made 4 giant ones instead.

I started by straightening out all the edges (and eating all the leftover bits) and was over the moon to find that when I chopped off pieces of it I could clearly see the layers inside!!!!! LAYERS!!!!! PUFFED UP LAYERS!!!!!

Each Mille-feuille needed three layers of pasty so I cut out 12 all together. They were a little bit on the large side but looked very neat and tidy so I was happy.

Here they are!!

The final step was to make the filling - Chantilly au Cacao

This was made up of very cold fresh cream, mascarpone, icing sugar and cocoa powder. Very easy to make, you just whisk the cream, mascarpone and icing sugar together with with an electric mixer and then incorporate the cocoa powder. It should be fairly stiff as it needs to stay between the layers without running all over the place but I'm always a bit wary of over whisking cream so keep an eye as you go.

Finally, to assemble the Mille-feuille, pipe on the cream using a fancy shaped nozzle , chop up some tinned pear halves and place a few in between the cream and layer it up.

Top with the third pastry rectangle and dust with icing sugar and cocoa powder. Serve with a nice glass of whatever you like and a pat on the back for a job well done.

Eat up and then realise that something that took you the entire day to make has disappeared in about 5 minutes! Never mind, it just means you'll have to do it all again... but maybe not for a few weeks!!