Week 8: Lamination edification

When constructing the schedule, the plan for week 8 seemed to be a no-brainer. We were approaching Mardi Gras and, of course, king cake (galette des rois) would have to be on the list! However, my American Cakes cookbook threw a curveball: TWO different recipes for king cake! As expected, one was a yeasted and cinnamon-sugar filled affair, but the other was a puff pastry and frangipane-stuffed slab. Well, what's a girl to do, but make both versions?! It also helped that we had a Mardi Gras taco potluck planned at work on Wednesday (we like to think outside the box), so I definitely had one of the cakes spoken for.

Mille feuilles, prĂȘt a manger!
First things first, though: puff pastry. When I first started baking, puff pastry both fascinated me and intimidated me to no end. Part of the reason being my excellent circulatory system (bear with me here). You see, I run warm most of the time and rarely have cold hands/feet. And the secret to flaky pastry, be it in pie crust, croissants, or puff pastry, is tiny pockets/sheets of butter within the dough creating the ultimate buttery texture of the finished baked product. So having my radiating heat mitts seemed to mean certain doom for my pastry perfection aspirations. But now that I have some experience under my belt, I can just work faster and smarter. Lamination time!

I settled on making the puff pastry by following a recipe from Sherry Yard (one of her cookbooks has a photo of stacks of different colored puff pastry in cross-section and it is just the most gorgeous thing). I had extra pastry beyond what was needed for the king cake so I baked the leftover sheet up for some raspberry napoleons. The pastry cream was a little thin so the structural integrity of the finished product was a little suspect. And the whole raspberries in there also contributed to the wobbliness. The end product was rather snazzy, though, and help up relatively well in the fridge for a couple days. 

Puff pastry galette des rois
The puff pastry king cake was next. Further investigation led me to the conclusion that this was essentially a pithivier, but bespeckled with green, purple, and gold. This is not a bake that takes well to prolonged storage - the pastry gets somewhat soggy which then becomes a bummer. Given the storage concerns of this cake, I opted to postpone making the yeasted king cake so that it would be nice and fresh for the potluck.





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