Baking Bouchon - Recipe 45: Paris - New York

The name of this recipe is weird.  I don't like it when I can't tell what something is by the name of it because then when I tell other people what I made I have to make something up.  I ended up calling these peanut butter cream filled pastries which is boring. 

There is nothing boring about these.  In fact, they're freaking amazing.

Apparently this name is a play on a famous French pastry, Paris-Brest, which commemorates a  famous bike race in Paris.  The pastry dough is piped in the shape of a circle which is supposed to represent the tire of a bicycle.  Typically, it's filled with praline pastry cream but this recipe puts a twist on that and is filled with peanut butter pastry cream... hence the reference to New York because peanut butter comes from New York (which is totally not true but maybe Parisians think that's true because they don't know of anywhere else in the United States where peanuts actually come from like Alabama where I used to work in the nuthouse... aka peanut processing facility, but that's a story for another day).

They start with pate a choux - which is what cream puffs are made of.  I've made this dough before and it was still pretty easy.  Flour, sugar, water and butter get cooked together, then eggs are whipped in until the dough is smooth and sticky.  The whole things gets refrigerated, then piped into circles/tires.

This version also gets sprinkled with salted peanuts before it's baked which looks beautiful in the picture in the cookbook.  In reality, they all fall off when you slice the pastries in half to fill them.

Let's talk for a few minutes about the peanut butter pastry cream that fills the pastries.

If dreams were made of peanut butter, they would taste like this.

OK, that was dramatic but if you think I loved diplomat cream, this stuff is diplomat cream on steroids.

To make this heavenly concoction, you make diplomat cream (which is pastry cream lightened with whipped cream), add creamy peanut butter, a little salt and buttercream frosting. 

See?  I told you.

I really wish I could feed this stuff to you via the Internet.  Once they figure out how to do that, you all are going to love this blog a lot more.

So, we've got a light and puffy little ring of pastry.  It's sliced in half, filled with peanut butter deliciousness, sprinkled with salted peanuts, topped with the lid of the pastry and sprinkled with powdered sugar.

Now, please enjoy an unnecessary number of pictures of these round delights...

Did you notice my new cake stand?  My mom got it for me for my birthday, I love it!

You should know that I took these to work and was told that they are the best treats I've ever brought in.  I agree that these are in the top 5 and worth as much work, if not more, than it took to make them.  CA was a big fan as well.  So everyone is happy and I'm in a peanut butter coma because I ate all the leftover cream by squirting it out of the pastry bag directly into my mouth, and I don't regret one single bite.

Enjoy!
Julie