French Bread

Originally posted on Facebook March 27, 2009

So I've never made bread before and I've heard it's tricky so I was very nervous and had no idea how this was going to turn out.

1 cup hot water
1 tablespoon white sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons yeast
1 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 cups flour
1 egg yolk
1 tablespoon water

Grease or oil a bowl and grease a cookie sheet. Combine hot water, sugar and yeast and allow to proof (aka allow to rise, basically let it sit for 10 min or so). Then add salt then flour and kneed until dough is no longer sticky. Place in oiled bowl and roll around so the oil coats all sides. Cover and allow to rise for 30 min or until it has doubled in size. Punch down and roll out into a 16 x 12 inch rectangle. Cut the rectangle in half along the 16 inch side so that you have 2 rectangles 8 x 12 inches. Roll up each rectangle and squeeze out any air bubbles, twist the ends to seal them. Make some diagonal slashes along the top. Place on greased cookie sheet. Cover and allow to rise for 30 - 40 min or until it has doubled in size. While you're waiting for it to rise preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Mix together egg yolk and water and brush over the dough. Bake for 20 - 25 minutes.

This bread turned out so well. I was worried it was going to be doughy and disgusting because I know bread is tricky and I'd never done it before. Also, I used bread machine yeast but didn't use a bread machine and I didn't use bread flour like was called for in the original recipe. But it turned out just fine! I'm so happy that it turned out well. This bread was amazing straight out of oven with butter and honey but it would also be good for sandwiches and stuff. I loved it, I will make it again for sure.

Eclaires

Originally posted on Facebook March 30, 2009

These were a special request, well more of a strong suggestion, from one of my engineering friends. He's from Mauritius, a small island nation that was once a French colony, so there's a lot of French influence there. I was very nervous making them because I know how tricky cream puff type pastry can be to make. But I figured I'd give it a try. I found an excellent recipe at Allrecipes.com and got to work.

Pastry
1 cup water
1/2 cup butter
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour
4 eggs

Preheat oven to 400. Boil the water in a medium sized pot. Stir in the butter and salt until melted. Add the flour, all at once, stirring vigorously until mixture forms a ball. Remove from heat and stir in eggs, one at a time. Spoon in tablespoons onto cookie sheet (it may be a good idea to cover this in parchment paper) leaving lots of room in between pastries for expansion. Bake at 400 for 15 minutes and then turn heat down to 375 for another 10-15 min, until pastries are golden brown. Leave to cool completely.

Filling
1 package (250 g) cream cheese, softened
2 cups milk
1 package (30 g) instant vanilla pudding mix

Slowly beat 1/2 cup of milk into the cream cheese until creamy. Then beat in the remaining milk and the package of pudding mix. Stir until thick, 1 to 2 minutes. Cut cooled pasty shells in half and spoon pudding mixture in between the halves.

Chocolate Sauce
1 (1 ounce) square of unsweetened chocolate, chopped
1 tablespoon butter
1 cup icing sugar
2 tablespoons hot water

Melt the butter and chocolate together over low heat. Remove from heat and mix in icing sugar and hot water. Drizzle over filled eclaires. Mmmmmm, chocolate, cheesecake, pudding, pastries.....

I'd have to say these are the weirdest thing I've ever tried making. The pastry when it's in the pot smells and looks very odd. And then it gets even weirder when you add the eggs start to put them on the pans. They puff up quite nicely in the oven and smell great when they are finished. They also taste AMAZING when finished. A warning though, the filling part of the recipe makes way more than needed for what the pastry part makes. So I ended up making two batches of pastry and icing. Of course I ran out of icing sugar on the second batch of icing, but it still turned out okay.

My family (mostly, my parents) was commenting about the unnecessary calories they had ingested all weekend so I took these to school and handed them out to whichever engineers were sitting near me in my last class. And the friend I made them for managed to eat five.