Sweet Tooth

Have you had any sweet treats this week?

The last two weeks I have been super into having a warm bowl of oatmeal with a good dash of cinnamon, a teaspoon of vanilla scented sugar, a tablespoon of chia seeds, and lots of apple chunks for breakfast. Are you an oatmeal person? How do you eat it? The fiance eats his oatmeal uncooked with some cold milk and sugar sprinkled on top. There are so many recipes and ideas online for ways to have oatmeal in the morning but I like to stick to my usual combo.

Remember how I mentioned having a scone at Strangas last Sunday when I was there for a macaron course? Well, I've still been dreaming of scones. A warm blueberry lemon scone would be perfect for this sunny spring day!

We received a Smartbox for a sweet treat this week from some friends of ours. Since the gift card was expiring this weekend, we had to use it! There are several places you can choose to redeem your gift card at. For example, you can have cake and macarons at Strangas, you can have cupcakes at Serenity in the city, or you could try a mix of baked treats and meringues from Dessertdragen. Since I've already tried most things at Strangas, the fiance and I decided to order a box of treats from Dessertdragen. I was pleasantly surprised by how delicious their berry tarts, brownies, and shortbread cookies were. Their meringues though were by far my favorite. They were amazing! They tasted like chocolate chip cookie dough in a meringue form. I'm already thinking about how I can recreate them at home! By the way, we didn't eat everything in one sitting, we actually spread all of the treats out over three nights!

Another day, another ice cream. My friend S and I went to Social Food in Frederiksberg yesterday for some ice cream. Wow. Their vanilla bean ice cream was phenomenal! Seriously. I normally try to taste more "exciting" flavors when I have ice cream out, but this vanilla bean ice cream just looked too good to resist.

And now it is the weekend! Any sweet plans for this last weekend in March?

Pâte à Choux + Profiteroles

I borrowed Julia Child's cookbook "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" from the library a few weeks ago and of course I turned to the sweet section first. A lot of Julia Childs' recipes are quite complicated and require a lot of steps and a lot of measurement converting on my part. After watching Rachel Khoo make chouquettes, I knew making the pastry dough for profiteroles would not be so hard. In fact, it is a real breeze. Pâte à choux is a pastry dough that is used to make chouquettes, eclairs, profiteroles, and croquembouches to name a few. So learning how to make this dough could come in handy!

Pâte à Choux (adapted from Julia Child)
Makes about 24 small puffs

1 cup water
86g unsalted butter
pinch of salt
1 tsp sugar
3/4 cup flour
4 eggs

Preheat the oven to 218C and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Bring water to a boil in a saucepan/pot together with the butter, salt, and sugar and boil slowly until the butter has melted. Meanwhile, measure out the flour.

Remove the boiling mixture from the heat and immediately pour in all of the flour at once. Beat vigorously with a wooden spoon for several seconds to blend thoroughly. Then beat over a moderately high heat for 1 to 2 minutes until the mixture leaves the sides of the pan and the spoon, forms a mass, and begins to coat the bottom of the pan. 

Remove saucepan from the heat and stir the dough for a minute or two to help it cool down slightly. Make a well in the center of the dough before beating the first egg into the pastry until it is absorbed. Continue with the rest of the eggs beating them in one by one. the third and fourth eggs will be abosrbed more slowly. Beat until everything is blended and the dough is smooth. 

Scrape the dough into a piping bag (with or without a large round tip) and pipe puffs that are 1 and a half inches in diameter or whatever size you would like them. Brush with an eggwash if desired. (You will need another egg for this, I skipped this step.)

Bake at 218C for about 20 minutes. The puffs are done when they have doubled in size, are golden brown, and firm and crusty to the touch. Remove them from the oven, turn off the heat, and pierce the side of each puff with a sharp knife to release the steam. Then place the puffs back in the oven and leave the door ajar for 10 minutes. Cool the puffs on a rack. Use the same day, or freeze them to use at a later time. (If you go the freezing route, put the frozen puffs in the oven for a few minutes to recrisp them.)

To turn my little puffs into profiteroles, I just cut a little slit in them and filled it with a spoon of vanilla ice cream and topped them with a sprinkling of icing sugar and some raspberries. 

Bon appétit!