I Hate this Pastry Bag

This adventure is brought to you by running out of cookies to bring to a Christmas party. Yes, seriously. After divvying up the many cookies, I realized that I didn't have quite enough to bring to a Christmas party. The obvious solution? Make a croquembouche, of course! The idea for this dessert came from two places: first, it was one of the challenges on Master Chef Junior and I figured that if children could do it, I surely could as well and second, my mom got a lovely dessert stand as a gift that honestly looks like it is meant to hold a croquembouche (and nothing else).

What is a croquembouche, you ask? Well, friends, it's a tower of cream puffs held together with caramel and decorated with spun caramel. It's just a lovely and festive dessert. And, conveniently enough, my mom was going to help me bake it! She's so nice. The plan was for me to make the cream puff shells the day before in CT and bring them to NJ for filling and assembly. Long story short: I didn't. No excuses here, just didn't do it. So I got to NJ around 2:00 needing to make the shells, the cream (which has to chill for 2 hours), the caramel, and then assemble everything by 7:00. No pressure, right? Oh, and if you're wondering why I got such a late start, it's because I saw Star Wars at 8:30 am. No regrets - we only paid $14 for 2 tickets.

So, it's possible that when I arrived, my mom got a bit frustrated with me for not telling her that I didn't make the shells but hey, that makes things more interesting, right? We were racing against the clock! We got to work on the pastry cream first since that needed to chill for 2 hours. And by "we" I definitely mean my mom. I'm not sure I did anything with that pastry cream except hand my mom ingredients and bowls and read the directions out loud. But my track record with custard is not the best so I was happy to cede control to my mom. Eventually, the custard started custard-ing and looked very nice so into the fridge it went. We did taste a bit before chilling and it seemed awfully sweet. Oh, I should mention that the recipe called for a really really tall croquembouche and we weren't doing that so we halved the recipe. Dividing by 2 is hard! At one point, we had to figure out the conversion for 1/3 cup to tablespoons because we don't have a 1/6 cup measure. If memory serves, it was 3 tbsp + 1 tsp so dividing by 2 made it 1.5 tbsp + 1/2 tsp. It was a lot of math and a lot of looking for the right measuring instruments. 

Custard in the fridge, time to go buy a Christmas tree! Yes, in the middle of baking, we had to go get a Christmas tree and carry it in and set it up. While I was putting water in the tree stand, my mom basically finished the dough for the pastry shells. I'm not sure I baked any of this dessert. Hmm. Anyway, I took charge of setting up the pastry bag. I hate this pastry bag. There's no other way to say it. It's the worst. It's a slippery, stiff, plastic-y bag that is hard to work with and always makes a mess. Also, I spent at least 5 minutes trying to put the piping tip on which was IMPOSSIBLE. At one point the tip flew across the kitchen. Turns out it didn't fit because it isn't for that pastry bag. Oops. Perhaps that one was user error. But the problem was that we didn't have a large plain tip for piping so we needed to use the large star tip. After a row of piping though, I figure out how to make smooth mounds and it started working out much better. Naturally, I couldn't fit all of the dough in the bag so there was a harrowing refilling process that made a huge mess. Meanwhile as I was piping, my mom was following to brush the puffs with egg wash and smooth out the spikes and scold me for piping them too close together. Joke's on you, mom, they puffed up just fine! 

Beautiful golden brown puffs. Lovely. 

Now it's time to fill the puffs! We were supposed to poke a hole, then fill the center with the cream. The problem is, piping with this bag one-handed is impossible. I had to hold the puff in one hand and pipe with the other and let's just say, it was all coming out the top. And I was getting in trouble for not filling them enough. Eventually I got the hang of that at least but my hands were shaking, my mom was telling me I was doing it wrong, and the greasy bag was just a mess. So my mom took the bag away volunteered to fill the rest. Oh, imagine that, she's having just as much trouble as I did! After a lot of laughing and calling her a smartass for thinking she could do it better, we developed a system where I held the puff while she piped two-handed. It got much easier. Our technique leaves something to be desired but we got it done. 

And then abandonment. My mom had to leave for a dinner and movie and I was left to make the caramel and assemble the whole thing. The caramel was just boiling sugar and water until it turned golden brown and my mom warned me that it can turn on a dime so I was watching very carefully. And watching. And watching. It took at least 10 minutes. I probably could have taken a walk. I also prepared an ice bath to put the pot in as directed to get it to stop cooking immediately once it hit the right color. Eventually, it started to turn brown. It seemed a little light but I noticed the sides were smoking a bit so I put it in the ice bath to be on the safe side. After a quick hiss, the bubbles cleared and behold! Lovely lovely golden brown caramel.

Now to assemble. I had to dip the sides of the puffs in the caramel and place them in a ring to form the base. On the second puff, I just barely nicked the tip of my finger in the caramel. Caramel burns hurt! It wasn't the end of the world but I do have a tiny caramel blister on my finger still. Meanwhile, the caramel is still in the ice bath and is now audibly cracking and hardening very very quickly. By the third puff, it was impossible to dip in the caramel because it was so hard. But, I used my brain (for once) and tossed the pot back on low heat to warm up the caramel and after a few minutes and some stirring, it was the perfect consistency again. I ended up repeating this process several times but it worked well. I stacked up the puffs and I am REALLY proud of how it turned out. Nice and symmetric and I even added some spun caramel as decoration, basically accomplished by using the spoon to drizzle caramel on but it worked great. Apparently I was supposed to use a fork or a broken whisk (a broken whisk? Who saves a broken whisk? Seriously?) but the spoon worked just fine. It probably helped that the caramel was slightly cool. Anyway, it's not as tall and fancy as many croquembouches but I love it just the same. 

I actually made a second one (not pictured) because I had so many leftover puffs. It wasn't quite as tall as the first but was pretty easy to replicate. Not sure why the Master Chef Junior children had such problems with it. Oh, and as for the taste, apparently the pastry shells cut the sweetness of the cream and people liked them. I don't actually eat cream puffs so I wouldn't know. But so pretty! Oh, and I finished the whole thing with an hour to spare. 

I think I need a bigger challenge for the next one. What do you think?

A Disney Moment: Home on the Range

Whoops, apparently I jumped the gun on leaving the last group of five. And nobody even corrected me! Shameful. Although, I can't blame you, dear readers, because Home on the Range is a solid middle of the pack movie and ranked a 3/5 according to my notes. I actually liked this one better than I thought I would because there were a lot of pretty funny background jokes that were going on and overall, it was not taking itself too seriously. But OMG, the yodeling song! This might be the trippiest scene since pink elephants! There are psychedelic cows! The colors! I remember being unable to stop laughing the first time I saw it. You can see it here if you haven't seen it before. It's worth it. I don't really remember the rest but oh boy, that yodeling. 

A Disney Moment: Chicken Little

Apparently my notes were not as good as I thought they were. I'm writing this now but I saw this movie well over a year ago. This group of five includes Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, Princess and the Frog, and Tangled. Two of these are clearly better than the other three. But I don't really remember the first three! I asked my sister to remind me and we determined that Chicken Little ranked a 3/5. Then I asked her why and apparently there was an actual bull in a china shop that I couldn't stop laughing at. So hang on, let me Wikipedia this movie to jog my memory....

Aha! Apparently just seeing the picture of Chicken Little jogged my memory! I loved his huge glasses! And he has the ugly duckling friend! The whole beginning of this movie had such charm! And then...aliens? Ok, things got a little weird at that point and I don't entirely remember so I won't comment. By the way, the Wikipedia entry for this movie was clearly written by an eight year old. So, umm, middle of the road movie but overall not too bad. Maybe I'll watch it again some day and try to figure out what happens in it. 

Team Truffle

Welcome back friends! I was a little slow on this blog post since I’ve already started my brand new, shiny, awesome job that currently comes with a 1.5 hour commute each way. In case you were wondering, that commute makes you very tired when you get home and you just don’t want to blog. But here I am because this was a super fun one. Before my grand departure from UConn, I decided that I wanted to make a treat to give my advisor. So, I decided that truffles would be perfect (mostly because I’ve been wanting to make truffles again) and I invited my friend over to help me with the truffles. Because it’s fun. Now, I could have just made one type of truffle and called it a day. But that’s not fun, nor is it insane. Instead we decided to make four types of truffles: Ebony and Ivory (which you may recall from the last time I made them), Oreo, Caramel, and Cookie Dough (which was my very first baking adventure that I blogged about!). Two repeats, two newbies, and a whole lot of chocolate! 

We started bright and early and spent a fair amount of time trying to decide on a good strategy. Then we gave up and just dove right in. Now it’s been a while so I may get the timeline wrong but I’ll give it a shot. I believe we started with the cookie dough ones so we could eat some cookie dough. Always a good plan. Plus they had to refrigerate for a while before being dipped in chocolate. I love how easy those cookie dough ones are. The only downside, of course, being the process of can opening. The recipe calls for condensed milk and I always forget how thick that is and try to use the poke-a-hole type of can opener instead of a legit one because I’m lazy. So yeah, it made a bit of a mess. But otherwise, it was super duper easy. We got our hands nice and dirty rolling them into balls but it was delicious so who cares? We threw them in the fridge and were amazed that with two people, the process only took about half an hour.

Oh! Now I remember how this actually went down! Ok, you see how I painted this lovely picture of us doing one thing at a time? That’s TOTALLY not how that happened. Before we started anything, we attacked the caramels. We had to unwrap about 26 of them and caramels (in case you didn’t already know) are kinda sticky. So that took a while. But the reason we did this first was because for the caramel truffles, we had to melt the caramels together with the chocolate, pour into a pan, refrigerate, then slice and roll into balls, and refrigerate again. Once all those suckers were unwrapped, I got to melting them on the stove while my friend started the cookie dough truffles. It sort of feels like we were both doing everything though because she needed help finding things in my kitchen (which is not organized logically at all) and I needed help with things like noticing that the caramels were practically boiling. Whoops. I get easily distracted. So the cookie dough and caramel ones wrapped at almost the same time. I have to compliment the author of the caramel recipe for the cool trick of lining a pan with plastic wrap, pouring the caramel mixture in and then just flipping them out after they cool for cutting and rolling. It was actually easy. Oh, I should mention that this recipe comes from my very first baking book, the Taste of Home Best Recipes 2010 cookbook. I missed using that book. It’s got such cute ideas.

For round two, we decided to divide and conquer. My friend was in charge of the Oreo truffles so I can’t really comment on those besides saying that they’re super delicious. I was in charge of the Ebony and Ivory truffles from the Death By Chocolate cookbook. If you recall, the last time I tried that one, my kitchen ended up covered in chocolate, I used the wrong chocolate, and I broke a whisk. I was endeavoring to avoid that this time. I was moderately successful. The first thing was that I actually used the correct type of chocolate. Then I did the whole boiling cream and using it to melt chocolate thing. This time I actually had metal bowls and didn’t have to use Pyrex bowls (which kinda don’t conduct heat). The cream melted the chocolate much better than last time but still needed a little help so I just put the bowls on top of the still-hot burners. I have an electric stove so the residual heat was just enough to finish the melting. I won’t get into the details of the timing of stirring, sitting, refrigerating, and all that because I already discussed that last time but suffice it to say that I set timers and was very careful to not screw it up. It went much better than last time but there was still the issue that on the last stir, the ebony part of the chocolate truffle got pretty hard and tried to break my whisk. I think the timing is just slightly off and maybe the last refrigeration period should be eliminated.

Anyway, at this point, my friend was done with her Oreo things for a bit so she helped me with rolling the truffles. Alas, same problem as last time. The white chocolate is still super oily and sticky and it made our hands a mess and made slightly deformed truffles. But we got it done pretty quickly and once they were rolled, we chucked them in cocoa so that hid the ugliness. Voila! Complete.

After this, there was more chocolate melting but it was all a bit of a blur. I was in charge of cutting the caramel truffles and rolling them into balls. However, I noticed that if I was moving too slowly, the balls started to flatten out. So I rushed through rolling them and tossed them in the fridge thinking that the coldness would slow the process. A few minutes later, I checked on them and they were all pretty flattened. My friend and I tried to reroll and fix them but we were just not quite fast enough and they ended up as disc-like truffles. Bad physics. Very bad physics.

The final step was dipping the cookie dough balls in chocolate. I was tired of melting chocolate so I pulled some ultimate ganache out of the freezer and melted that and dipped the cookie dough balls in that. And by “I”, I totally mean my friend who got really good at using spoons to dip the balls so that they looked neat and tidy and didn’t make a big mess.

So there we were, looking at four pans of truffles. They looked depressingly ugly to be honest. But we were proud that we made four types of truffles within about 3 hours.  The truffles still had some more refrigerating to go and my friend had to leave so I was in charge of packing them up and delivering the next day.

 Never underestimate the power of a good candy tin.

As ugly as these looked on the pans, they looked downright professional once they were put into candy tins in an assorted fashion. We could probably sell these for at least ten bucks a tin. So I put together a bunch of tins of truffles and they look lovely:

As far as the taste, shame on the baker because I still haven’t tried them all. I ate several of the Oreo ones (which are fantastic) and a few of the cookie dough ones (which are also pretty darn good but too sweet to eat more than one at a time). I just tonight tried one of the Ebony and Ivory ones. They're super delicious on the inside but I think that the cocoa on the outside is just a little bit too bitter. It'd be better with a thin milk chocolate coating I think. The inside is just top notch though. I haven’t touched the caramel ones. They’re still in my fridge. My fiancé tried them and informed me that the caramel ones are good but very hard because, duh, caramel. Shrug. I just haven’t been craving chocolate lately. I’ve been pawning them off to anyone I can think of including my chiropractor and friends that invited us over to dinner. Oh well. The moral of the story is this: Baking with friends is much easier and much more fun and you don’t have to be a professional to make some pretty professional-looking treats.

No Disney Moment this week. My sister and I are still trying to summon the will to watch Brother Bear. Once we do, I’ll have enough material for rankings I think. By the way, be on the lookout for another post really soon. It’ll be my last time baking in my kitchen before I move! Madness!