Baking Bouchon - Recipe 36: Pithiviers

What's that you said?  Actually, I've never said this word out loud because I don't know how.  It's French and I don't speak French.  It's the same reason they put numbers on the menus at some Asian restaurants and I am not ashamed to order #9.  I'm too embarrassed to try to pronounce the actual words and I appreciate the owners of these establishments saving me from myself.  That, of course, is no excuse for why I order by number at a fast food restaurant, that's just laziness. 

Pithiviers are rounds of pastry, usually puff pastry, that have filling stuffed in between.  So, basically, it's a hand pie or a mini pie or a dessert hot pocket.

This pithivier is filled with Frangipane.  Huh?  I know, another French word.  I don't know how to say that one either.  It's almond filling.  This version is almond cream mixed with pastry cream.

Luckily, I still had some puff pastry in the freezer from my puff pastry experiment so this recipe came together pretty quickly.  Unfortunately, that's the last of my stock and there are a few more recipes left in the cookbook that call for it so next time I'll have to make the pastry too.  I'll deal with that then, but for now I'm grateful I don't have to 'cause it's a lot of work.

The first step in making the frangipane was to make more pastry cream.  I've made this pastry cream three times before and each time I've made it with custard powder and each time it's been progressively more successful (as in progressively less thick and chunky).  The recipe says that you can use either custard powder or flour but I hadn't tried the flour version yet.  Mostly because I went to all the trouble of finding custard powder so I was darn well going to use it.  However, today I did not have any on hand,  so flour it is.

The difference was astounding.  The photo on the left shows today's version on the top and the previous version on the bottom.  Can you believe that's even the same thing?  It's crazy.  The flour version is significantly lighter in color and much less chunky.  In fact, I cooked the flour version significantly longer than the custard powder version and it was still much smoother.

So.... pretty much, I'm never buying custard powder again.  Never, ever, ever, ever.

To complete the frangipane I also needed to make almond cream to mix with the pastry cream.  This was actually pretty darn easy.  In fact, you don't even cook it which is weird because it has eggs in it.  However, since it's going to get cooked inside of the pastry, I'm not concerned about it.

The almond cream contains butter that is whipped up with powdered sugar, thickened with flour and almond meal and bound together with eggs.  It came together super quickly which is a nice change of pace.  Some of the fillings in this cookbook are awfully complicated, have crazy ingredients and take forever to make. 

Composing the frangipane is as easy as stirring together the pastry cream and the almond cream.  That's it.  This filling is pretty tasty, especially if you like almonds.  CA is a huge almond fan so I was quite hopeful that he'd like this one.  I like almonds too, and I liked the filling, but it ain't no diplomat cream, which is still the best filling on the planet.

The recipe calls for making one huge pithivier but anytime I make a big old dessert, CA and I have a terribly difficult time eating it all.  I much prefer giving desserts away and it's much harder to give away slices of something than it is to give away individual items.  For that reason, I decided to make these in 3 1/2 inch pastries instead of one big 9 inch pastry.

Each round gets a healthy swirl of frangipane and a lid.  Each pastry gets a bunch of slits along the side which is not only pretty, but it's also supposed to keep the two pieces of pastry from separating while they are baked.  A little bit of egg wash makes the pastries bake up nice and brown.  Finally, each pastry gets a little design etched into the top of it that becomes far more prominent as the pastry bakes and puffs.

These little girls are quite pretty.  They puffed up so nicely and turned a beautiful, golden brown.  I like to think of them as statuesque.  Unfortunately, they weren't all perfect specimens.

Some of them got all leaning tower of Pisa on me.  I guess I didn't line up the top and bottom pastries very well which caused them to topple.

In addition, I got totally freaked out by the puddle of butter that ended up on the bottom of the pan.  (Do you see that business all over the baking sheet up there?  It was positively liquidy.)  To be honest, it was quite off putting... for about a minute.  Then I forgot about it and ate it anyway.

These little girls are pretty yummy.  They're not super sweet.  The pastry is light and flaky and the frangipane kind of melts into the pastry.  CA loved them and said they'd be perfect for a brunch because it's kind of like having an almond croissant.  I told him that almond croissants were much later in the cookbook and he had to wait.

Julie