Pastry and Pups

This was the post I wrote before we lost Barkley, with some photos I'd recently taken.   I hesitated to post, but thought you might enjoy the recipes and the photo of him with the "But Mom, he's eating the last one!", expression.  But with a bat phone that went off in the wee hours, I thought it might be a good morning for this.   I may be on the road a while, but have posts saved to come up here and there so please stop in and say hello.  It does help.

 Best - B.

From my laptop on the dining room table, the sudden sound of Parisian music and a heavily accented male voice:

"It's a BIG sausage, very rustic."

Partner in Grime walks in the room, grinning and says "what ARE you watching?"

It was a video and recipe from Jean-Marie Blanchot, a pâtissier from Brittany, prepares the classic kouign-amann, a flaky, buttery cake to die for.

You can find them up in Canada, but no place anywhere near Hoosierville. So I was going to have to make my own

Kouign-amann also known as a Breton cake, is a round crusty cake made with bread dough containing layers of butter and sugar folded in (sort of ike puff pastry but less layers).  It's baked slowy until the butter puffs up the doubh and the sugar and sugar/butter coating  caramelizes and becomes crunchy and sweet, while the thin layers of cake inside absorb the buttery sweetness, making the interior soft and tender.  The name derives from the Breton words for cake ("kouign") and butter ("amann"), the recipe being around from about 1860.  Some are large, the size of a round cake pan, others, like mine, are made with individual squares of the dough, corners foldered up for perfect hand sized treats.

With a lot of bitingly cold days and a couple weekends that I didn't go home as Barkley had vet visits and the cold was bothering him, I used the big island in the crash pad kitchen and made a bunch, freezing it, to rise and bake later.  Croissants I make every few month as Partner loves them with coffee in the morning  The Breton cake was a new adventure.  It requires fairly advanced pastry skills, but thanks to the internet there are some recipes with detailed instructions to take some of the mystery out of it  There is no EASY method.  But there is really something satisfying about pulling a perfectly caramelized mélange of butter and sugar and salt out of the oven and tearing into the flaky layers while it's still so hot it almost burns your mouth (it does make up for those weekday breakfasts of low fat cereal and an apple)

Here's the underside of it - mmmmm caramelization!

My version was a blend of two recipes, and I'm not going to try and recreate it here without providing two disclaimers, several medieval curses and a weapon but if you have a hankering to make wonderful pastry, if only once, check out  Patisserie by Christophe Felder, and David Lebovitz's Kouign Amann recipe (the top of which, before baking, I dusted with just aextra  bit of vanilla sugar mixed with cinnamon).

If you want a pastry that' slightly easier, (you know, like the Bond Snake Slayer has slightly less recoil than Smith and Wesson 500) there are  some others which were also thawed and baked.

Croissants

OR

Croissants Pain au Chocolate

Mom!  Dad! - Veuillez donner le chien certains Pâtisserie française. Avec un femme caniche!

(And yes, he got to eat some of the plain croissants bits.)