Tom Douglas

Puff Pastry, Fig Tarts, Pastry Cream/ by Shelley Lance, Cookbook Co-author

In the test kitchen, work continues on the upcoming Dahlia Bakery Cookbook!  Pastry Chef Extraordinaire, Garrett Melkonian, walked me through the mysteries of puff pastry this morning.  (I don’t want to even think about how many years? decades? it’s been since I’ve made puff pastry.)  Garrett is developing a puff pastry recipe for the book that isn’t all the way classic, but pretty darn close.  It’s buttery and flaky and rises beautifully in the oven.  I’m calling it “Not So Rough Puff.”  Ok, it’s not as easy as apple pie (even apple pie isn’t easy); like all puff pastry, it’s a project that requires commitment.  But if you prefer you can instead use storebought puff pastry for the puff pastry tarts in the cookbook, and we’ll try to find some decent all-butter brands to recommend.  This is a fresh fig tart with pistachio marzipan, a variation on our Dahlia pear tart.

Look how high it’s rising-  (photo top right) That’s after less than 10 minutes in the oven!  We also baked some pear tarts, and Garrett worked on making the maple pastry cream (photo just above) a little thicker for our eclairs (because Tom likes the pastry cream in eclairs to be nice and thick.)

Oh yeah, we also made (and by “we,” I mean Garrett) a batch of vanilla buttercream-silky, satiny, and studded with vanilla bean seeds.  Next week- layer cakes! (By the way, one of my New Year’s resolutions will be to blog about something besides the Dahlia Bakery Cookbook, but, honestly, it’s all that I do these days!)

December 30th, 2010