Poof pastry!

Week 3 and we've moved onto making poof pastry. I take back what I said about needing elbow grease for choux pastry.....you definitely need some serious muscles for poof pastry! At times, it seems to have a mind of its own - no matter how hard you try to roll it out, 5 seconds later it shrinks, like some kind of evil giant piece of chewing gum! Some solid upper body strength and a "poof" of persistence should keep you on track though!

Our first poof pastry products to come out of the oven were a "tarte aux bandes" - essentially a fancy-looking "strip" of puff pastry with apples and "chaussons aux pommes" - literally, apple slippers but they're really apple turnovers. Both were very yummy, its funny sometimes how the most simple things made exceedingly well can blow you away....also felt a great sense of satisfaction biting into my own made crispy, flaky, buttery poof pastry....toot, toot to me! :-)

Since we finished school relatively early today, a fellow student and I pottered over to the 5th to check out a patisserie that she had found on the Internet, Carl Marletti. Its a chic bijou sort of place with some lovely looking pastries - I plumped for the eclair vanille, which was a little sweet but a lovely afternoon treat. My friend went for a Carl Marletti signature pastry, le Caraïbe.

Thats it for now but am sure we will be making more things with poof pastry this week, I have used poof instead of puff for this entry in honour of chef, another one of his eclectic sound effects, which he sometimes uses in demonstrations......"just like zat, POOF!" :-)