Rhubarb choux

I'd seen Raymond Blanc's Kitchen Secrets Show about pastries, and saw him make beautiful croquembouche and eclairs. Then two of my colleagues were making choux this week, and I wanted to have a go.
I wanted to make chocolate eclairs and set out to do so. But along the way got sidetracked with some rhubarb that needed to be cooked off, and thought about mixing the two things.
So I ended up with choux fingers, rhubarb cooked in sauternes, vanilla, orange, and made up some creme patissiere (Roux brothers on Patisserie recipe).
This evening I assembled it all. I had to cut the fingers in half to get the creme patissiere in, as I refused to cut my piping bag - i have the good one at home, and a smaller cheaper one in college, and I didn't want to hack about with the good one! So instead I cut open the choux, piped in the cream, laid the rhubarb on top, then sandwiched them back up and dusted with icing sugar.
They are really very nice to eat. Very very light, and some sharpness of rhubarb against the creme and pastry. Delicious.
Need to work on making them look a darn sight neater tho'.

Beef pie

Marinaded the beef overnight in red wine, rosemary, thyme, bay.
Then cooked onions, removed them from the pan, then tossed the beef in flour, and browned in the pan. Added marinade and herbs, some more wine and little water. And mushrooms. Cooked on the stove for about an hour.

I had some puff pastry in the freezer from making the sausage rolls the other week, so we defrosted that and it was ready to go. Brilliant.

I let the pie filling cool completely before putting the pastry over the top. Baked in a 200C oven for 40 minutes.
Unfortunately the bubbling gravy found a gap round the edge, and spilled out  a bit. No great horrors, but would have been better not to happen.

Served with some celeriac & potato mash and curly kale.

YUM.

Sausage rolls

It was definitely time to try puff pastry.
I'd saved the Lescure butter (low water content, unsalted french butter) for this purpose.
The process was really enjoyable, because the pastry becomes so beautiful: smooth pale delicate but robust. Great. Folding, resting, laminating the fat through the pastry was a lovely process.
I bought some 'premium' sausagemeat - slowly cooked some onions with thyme and added to the meat.
Then put together the pastry and meat, and glazed with egg wash.
I found cutting the sausage rolls quite tricky - there is a lot of fat (necessarily) in sausage meat which makes slicing through a bit difficult, so they got a little misshapen where I'd pressed to tightly.
The taste was delicious - really really deeply savoury. The meat juices that come out and cook on the bottom (little black bits) are packed with flavour, and it was all well seasoned.
As a dish they're pretty dirty :) but definitely tasty and fun.

Oh! and the pastry was very fine. Light, flaky, nicely puffy. And half of it is now in the freezer. More on the way...

Rough puff pastry tatin

This is my first attempt at rough puff pastry. It was nice on first eating, but didn't keep at all well the following day.
I didn't integrate the butter well enough. Also, the colouring on the apples isn't uniform enough - i needed to move them around much more in the pan (whilst keeping them in formation). I think tiredness was beginning to set in, and was followed up with illness, which has kiboshed me all this week.
A good mistake in a way - puff pastry is not considered easy, and the lamination needed to stop the fat just leaking out is good to understand and see it go a bit wrong.
Be good to try again when feeling better.

Mushroom, leek and thyme quiche

So this one turned out better. Still raggedy around the top, but no holes in the pastry so the filling didn't leak, and the taste and texture were sound.
The flavour of the filling was very nice - paris brown mushrooms, leeks - sweated in some butter, and some thyme to give aroma and lightness.
The recipe called for only double cream and eggs for the custard, but I thought this was too heavy and lightened it with some milk, and adjusted the cooking times accordingly. A lot of guess work and just waiting and seeing with this - as I was using different diameter and different ingredients for the custard.
Worked well tho'. Can hold my head up for this quiche :)

Salammbos

These are from Michel Roux's brilliant "Pastry" book. They are choux buns filled with chocolate creme patissiere and topped with caramel.

I'd made the choux buns on friday, so they were ready to go.

I made up a small amount of creme patissiere (250ml), added chocolate. Then whisked up some double cream and blended the two together.

Then I made the caramel - 150g sugar to 25ml water - so it was very thick. I boiled it up til it started to turn amber, then as directed, plunged the pan into cold water. This stopped the cooking process, but also hardened the caramel very fast. In order to dip the choux buns in and for them to come out smoothly, i had to keep returning the caramel pan to the stove to melt again - without over-cooking it. I got there in the end, with only a few blisters on my hands where the caramel got me.
Once the choux was coated with caramel, I piped the creme patissiere in.
They were really delicious - very light - not at all heavy feeling, which is surprising with all that sugar, pastry, cream ;) I liked the almost smoky deep flavour of the caramel, with the soft choux bun, and creamy chocolatey middle. Yum.

Choux buns - better

After feeling very low and ill on thursday, I cheered myself up with some Choux buns on Friday. These turned out lovely.
I only did one tray this time - to avoid the choux mountain i created before - and they cooked so much better in the oven. The oven struggles with two trays - and cooks very unevenly and weirdly across them both.
There's a terrific Michel Roux recipe for these covered with caramel and filled with chocolate creme patissiere. Watch this space. (update: Salammbos made 21 Nov)

Profiteroles with Sauternes poached pears

Digging into the previously mentioned choux mountain, I decided to fill the buns with a mix of cream and creme patissiere - from my abandoned pear tart plan.
I decided also to rescue the sauternes poached pears and serve alongside.
The plan worked deliciously in the end - via two rounds of ceased/siezed chocolate, which drove me nuts.
Making the chocolate go grainy and separate out was ok once, but when it happened again I got cross. Resorted to internet for advice.
Seemed that recipe that said put 'chocolate, butter and water' over a pot to heat - was madness as the chocolate and water together would always make the chocolate seize. So ignored that bit and it worked lovely.
All in all it was a day of seizures and splits : /

Choux mountain

I decided to make profiteroles as I like them and have never done choux paste before.
Results were OK - the varying heat in the oven was very apparent - the top right corner being a real hotspot, which meant rotating the trays. This I think disturbed the buns a bit. Also - the oven needed to be hotter when there were two trays in there. The more heat - the more they rose.