Chai Time!

I had a friend's birthday a couple of weeks ago and since they requested not to receive presents, what else could I do but do a bit of baking for them? In the week or so leading up to it, my plans were massive. The creative juices were going into overdrive. This was mostly because it coincided with the ending stages of my thesis and I was looking for any distraction I could get. I wanted to do three things: eclairs, cream horns and a mille-fuille (think vanilla slice), all with a chai theme.

The first step was to get some chai. Thankfully being connected, I was able to score some from T2, just about as nice as a chai I can get without having to do any serious research, at a discounted price.

 

Cheap Chai!

Next step was to make the pasty cream. It's the same as any pastry cream, except I infused the tea into the milk while it was heating and let it steep for a bit along with a vanilla bean. Following that I blanched egg yolks (deliciously vibrant yellow free range, organic yolks) with sugar, added flour and cornflour, poured in the milk and then cooked it out for a bit. It's this cooking stage where I had been failing in all my previous attempts. With a regular custard, you cook it until it gets to a coating consistency. However for a pastry cream, with the addition of flour, it needs to be cooked to a real thick paste, essentially what you'd need for it to be able to be piped. It's almost as if you disregard overcooking it and go until it gets super thick, usually requires a boiling temperature for the flour to really kick in. The end result is a super thick, chai flavoured filling.

Transfer of flavour achieved.

So for my three pieces, I needed three types of pastry: choux, shortcrust and puff. The first two I made and the last was shop bought because only crazy people make their own puff (I now swear by the yellow box you buy at fancy supermarkets, I forget what it's called but it beats the pants of the Pampas crap in Coles/Woolies).

Pretty pattern AND non-stick.

 Making choux pastry is a work out. You can do it with a machine but there's less washing up if you just do it by hand. Once again, it's a very simple process. Bring butter and water/milk (I used to use milk only but I think it's better to use at least 50:50 ratio, sometimes with more water than milk) to a boil and then quickly mix in all the flour. Return it back to the heat constantly mixing until it goes from a stodgy mess to a shiny yellow ball, a couple of minutes perhaps. After that, take it off, trasnfer to another bowl and give it another beat for a couple of minutes to knock out as much heat as possible. At this point you can give your arm a bit of a rest because following this step, you have to beat in the eggs one at a time. When you first add the egg in, it looks too wet but just keep working at it and it'll get incorporated into the dough. Once that's done, pipe it into 1.5x5cm logs on a lined baking tray, I used my sexy new silicon mat, and then bake to get pretty eclairs! I think my dough may have been a bit wet, as a result although the puffed up, they collapsed quickly.

Best eclairs I've ever made.

Shortcrust is even easier to make. Rub the flour, sugar and ice-cold butter together and then add ice cold water. Form a dough out of it, let it rest then roll it out to whatever you need. For a large quantity it might be worth using a food processor to mix the butter and flour but I only made a small portion so hands were fine, you just need to work quickly so the butter doesn't melt. The best/worst thing about this is your hands smell like butter for the next week. For the mille-fuille, I needed discs, but I didn't actually end up making them because I ran out of time, pastry cream and patience.

For the cream horns, I cut some strips of puff pastry out and wrapped them around my moulds. This is probably the simplest of the process. I saw a video saying to brush the strips with water before rolling them. I tried with egg wash and then rolled them but found it made the entire process to wet and sloppy, to the point where the pastry wasn't sticking to itself or the mould. So stopped brushing them and just saved the egg wash for when they went into the oven. I was really pleased with how they turned out. As you can see there's a clearly defined hole for the filling to go into. My only gripe is the moulds were so small, as a result the cream horns were bite sized. One thing I found I needed to do was create a seal at the pointy end so any filling wouldn't dribble out, I used caramel but chocolate would have sufficed.

Kind of look like sea shells, something I'll definitely take advantage of.

Once everything was made, it was just time to fill them. The pastry cream went into the eclairs, a chocolate topping on top and some gold leaf to class it up a bit. I mixed a bit of whipped cream into the remaining pastry cream *cough-to-pad-it-out-a-bit-cough*, filled the cream horns and then put them in the freezer to set. Once it was set, I dipped the exposed end in melted chocolate to form a bit of a seal. It all went into a box with tons of Persian fairy floss acting as packing material, and it was completed. In reality the pastry cream was a bit floury, chocolate topping was uneven (somehow I've lost the ability to melt chocolate), and the whole thing looked a mess.

Next time I'll either be posting about the dreaded macarons (are they even scary anymore? They've been conquered by so many already) or if I never get around to that, my seafood birthday bonanza.