It's All About Tuesdays . . .

Welcome to the June 17th Edition of Tuesdays With Dorie , the once a week baking club that gets together and bakes the same recipe each week from the lovely baking book Baking, from my home to yours, by the phenomenal baker and cookery book writer, Ms Dorie Greenspan! I was really excited when I read that this weeks recipe would be Peppermint Cream Puff Ring on pages 290-292 as chosen by Caroline of A Consuming Passion .

Ahhhhh . . . cream puffs . . . my mind clouded with visions of horror. Cream puffs are my nemesis. I have never been able to successfully make a cream puff. They say that on the precipice of death one's whole life flashes before their eyes . . . I can attest that on the precipice of making these, every horrible cream puff disaster of my past flashed before my eyes, beginning with the first one . . .

I was fourteen, and I wanted to make something spectacularly splendiferously delicious for my family. I wanted these to be so much better than the creamed vegetables that I had tried that ended up looking like, and what's worse tasting like, a gluey mass of varied colours. I measured out all the ingredients accurately and followed the directions precisely and ended up with . . . big flat blobs of eggy blah . . .

It has been ever so with me and cream puffs . . .

I had really high hopes for this one though . . . after all people, it was a Dorie Greenspan recipe!! I had never really had one of her recipes fail for me yet! I was bound to be successful finally!

I decided to do it on Saturday afternoon when I had lots of time and nothing else pressing me and I had visions of this being a lovely dessert for Todd and our Father's Day celebrations. He is not a chocolate lover so I had already decided before hand that I would fill it with the mint cream and strawberries and maybe a drizzle of white chocolate on top instead of dark. I read through the recipe several times just to make sure I followed the directions properly. (Any time I have ever had a failure with a recipe it's been because I haven't followed it properly. I have a tendency at times to get ahead of myself and then think . . . Oh Dear! I shoulda done this or I shoulda done that!) Not THIS time . . . I was not going to let anything get in the way of me finally achieving cream puff masterdom! This would be perfect.



I measured everything out and had it all ready to go . . . brought the milk and water (not to mention sugar and pinch of salt) to a boil on top of the stove and added my flour en masse! Ta Da!!! A perfect floury blob!!! Just what I was supposed to have! I even had a light coating of flour stuff on the bottom of the pot.

I was a bit confused about the eggs. Normally when you beat cold eggs into hot things you end up with a hot thing full of bits of scrambled egg. Dorie's recipe didn't specify waiting for the floury mass to cool down before adding the eggs. What to do . . . what to do. I re-read it a few times to see if I just wasn't missing something, but I wasn't. It didn't say exactly and so I flew by the seat of my pants and beat each egg in anyways, while the flour mixture was still hot.



Whew! I ended up with something which looked precisely like what it said in Dorie's book that it should look like . . . a glossy thick batter, of piping consistency. Not a piece of scrambled egg in sight anywhere to be found!



I got out my piping bag and with trembling fingers and heart I managed to pipe what I was supposed to pipe out on my parchment paper lined baking sheet, upon which I had dutifully drawn an 8 inch circle before hand. I had a bit of extra dough leftover so I piped out some small puffs as well.

Into the oven it went. I baked it for the first baking time at the higher temperature and when my timer went off I lowered the temperature and baked it for the remaining time period. I peeked and it looked like it was browning faster on one side than the other so I very carefully turned it around . . .



Perhaps this was my first mistake, I'll never know . . .

But what I ended up with was a deflated eggy ring that was not fit for human consumption . . .



Woe is me . . . woe is me. It looked lovely and brown, but it was decidedly flat and not only that . . . the darn thing was stuck to the parchment paper and I could barely get it off at all. I was so dissappointed . . . cream puff pastry, Choux paste had defeated me yet again . . .

But had it??? The smaller puffs, whilst still sticking to the parchment stayed a lot flufflier looking. True, when I peeled them off of the paper, half of their insides stayed on the paper, but I found that if I sandwiched two of them together with some sliced berries and a good dollop of creme fraiche I still had something slightly edible . . . a light dusting of icing sugar hiding all evils and making it look somewhat appealing.



So there you have it . . . my first Tuesdays With Dorie failure . . . for all the world to see. Can you feel my pain?

Next week the recipe is Mixed Berry Cobbler on pages 416-417, as chosen by Beth of Our Sweet Life. OH, that does sound delicious. It's hard to mess up a cobbler . . . isn't it?

In the meantime hop on over to the blog roll and see all the other creations, and I believe that if you click on Beth's page you can get the actual recipe. I do recommend that y'all just buy the book however. You can get a copy of it for as little as $8.32. The recipes are really good and then you can join the baking group too, and go on this Baking Adventure with the rest of us! Aside from this one recipe, all of them have worked out beautifully for me, and I am on a search now to figure out why this one didn't turn out . . . I am sure I must have done something wrong . . . choux paste . . . grrrrrr . . . ever arte thou my nemesis . . .



The birds did enjoy it though . . . .