Our October 2012 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Suz of Serenely Full. Suz challenged us to not only tackle buttery and flaky puff pastry, but then take it step further and create a sinfully delicious Mille Feuille dessert with it!
You know when you can't pronounce the name of a dessert then it is going to be good. This Mille-feuille is no exception. These are also known as Napoleons.
The dessert takes a little while to make but it is not very hard to make and looks very elegant. The first step is making the puff pastry. I have made puff pastry before so this was not very different. The key to puff pastry is all the layers of dough and butter. It sounds difficult - but isn't. It does take at least several hours though as there is lots of time in the refrigerator.
The next step is making the pastry cream. A little stirring but easy to make. I don't think mine quite thickened enough but not sure. It oozed a little more than I expected but hard to know - it could be right. It was good either way.
The pastry and pastry cream get layered together - then comes the tricky part. You make a royal icing and melt some chocolate for the top and then you need to work quickly. You quick put the royal icing on, then a thin stream of chocolate, then you use a knife to make the pattern in the top. You need to do this all in kind of one step since the icing and chocolate both start to set up. Mine went pretty well. I used a plastic bag to stream the chocolate on and I cut the hole in the bag a little big so the chocolate was a little wider than desired - but it still looked ok to me.
The hardest part of the whole thing was cutting it after everything had set-up. The chocolate doesn't really want to cut and the pastry cream wants to ooze. It came out nice though and tasted delicious. Nice and flakey pastry and the pastry cream was yummy. I only wish this was next months recipe since it would work great for the progressive dinner I need to make dessert for. I'm sure there will be something equally yummy though :)