Baking Bouchon - Recipe 93: Pastry Galettes

The Puffy Pastry Chapter is done and this was the easiest recipe yet!  It helped that I had already made the puff pastry dough because that is a huge pain in the butt and to be honest with you, I don't think I'll ever make my own again.  The frozen pastry is just fine with me.

These little treats are slices of puff pastry that are covered with royal icing and baked.  They're really very tasty.  The puff pastry is nice and buttery, but there's no sugar in it so the icing adds just enough sweetness to make these a nice little bite.

The royal icing is super easy to make, it's just a combination of powdered sugar, egg whites and lemon juice.  That gets stirred up, spread on top of a rolled our sheet of puff pastry and frozen.  Once it's frozen, it's sliced into little bars and baked.

Unfortunately, these things are hideous.  The icing ran off the sides while they were baking and pooled on the sheet pan.

The picture in the book (above) shows them as perfect little rectangles, mine certainly were not.  However, their looks didn't stop us from eating them.  I'm not joking when I tell you that CA ate 20 of them over the course of 15 minutes.  The next morning, I told him that he didn't need to take them to work since he liked them so much we could keep them.  He said "absolutely not" and took them all to work.  That's what late night binge eating will do to you.

Reflecting on this chapter of the cookbook, my favorite use of the puff pastry was in the Pithiviers.  These were round of pastry filled with a mixture of pastry cream and almond cream - delicious!  I also loved 3 of the 4 versions of croissants - traditional, chocolate and almond.

The worst were the Palmiers a la Framboise which probably would have tasted fine if I could have finished the recipe without screaming in frustration.  I also was not a huge fan of the raisin croissants for obvious reasons.

I'm starting to actually believe that I'll finish this cookbook before the move which is a huge motivator!

Enjoy!
Julie