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| A properly prepared honey bomb |
Week 6 brought a marathon baking Sunday. For weeks, I'd been thinking about taking a crack at some choux pastry treats. Eclairs, cream puffs, croquembouche, Paris-brest, and so on. I've been fascinated with this technique for quite some time, but I can't actually remember having worked with choux. So it seemed high time to try introduce myself to the World of Choux. Good thing that my
Scandinavian Baking cookbook (aptly named, mind you) had an interesting twist: rhubarb cream puffs. I recalled that there was leftover rhubarb from the yard still hiding in the freezer, and that rhubarb clearly needed a purpose. Well, problem solved! This seemed like a perfect bake to brighten up the doldrums of February. But why settle for one bake when you have the whole day free for the using? I got sucked down the rabbit hole of recipe reconnaissance and decided to add honey bombs to the list. After all, we'd recently gone to the Worker B Collective and stocked the pantry with several varietals of honey. And then I remembered the leftover milk in the fridge and that I'd wanted to try my hand at making hot milk cake. With that, my marathon bake schedule was complete.*
Started things out with the honey bombs. A pretty basic honey and spice cake that turned out reasonably well in the muffin tins. Used a basic wildflower honey since the spices would have overpowered the nuances of a fancier honey. It's a dark bake so I may have let them go a tad over which dried them out a bit. It was decided that, in accordance to the recipe hints, these were best split, toasted, and buttered.
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| Hot milk cake with lemon buttercream |
Next up was the hot milk cake. I don't really remember how/when I'd first heard of this, but it, too, had been on my experiment list for a while. The trouble has been that, since we don't really drink milk at the house, we rarely have milk for making said cake. Now that we did have some, it was time to
carpe lac. The cake itself was simple enough, though it did stick to my nonstick baking pan. Makes sense, in hindsight - pesky milk proteins. While the cake was cooling, I remembered the leftover lemon buttercream that was also languishing aimlessly in the freezer. It needed a thaw and then some rejeuvenation over a water bath, but was the perfect finishing touch. Well, if you like frosting, that is.
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| Various choux shapes, including a rhubarb & cream filled swan |
While the cake was cooling, I tackled the pâte à choux pastry, opting to rely on Jacques Pepin's
Complete Techniques to guide my way. This is a French dough, after all. Piped out cream puffs as well as some eclair fingers, and a few swan heads, for fun. La-dee-dah and oh la la. I don't think my puff mounding/piping was quite successful, but was less of an issue once split and stuffed with whipped cream and rhubarb. I definitely don't have the eclair finger piping down yet, and need to test that out with some properly filled eclairs. Problem with cream puffs is that they really need to be enjoyed in rather quick succession once assembled. Next choux outing, I'll aim for adding some sugarwork and constructing a croquembouche, as well as something silly like swans swimming in a raspberry coulis lake with a caramel cage. And, of course, some proper eclairs. Go big or go home!
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Full disclosure: I'd also located some peaches dithering away in the freezer, and the original schedule included a whiskey peach upside down cake. It was too much, you guys! What is this, an ultra-marathon?!? I don't even like running.
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