I love looking at and eating French Pastries. I read recipes. I marvel at baking shows where they whip them up but I have always been a bit hesitant to make them myself. Sure I have make croissants a time or two but anything else seemed ... intimidating. That is until now.
The Backstory
I have been taking online classes from Bake from Scratch / Williams-Sonoma for some time now. I watch, learn and marvel. I usually chicken out making the week's lesson with the "excuse" that I don't have enough people to share with or enough freezer space. Today, I changed that. I pulled out the Mille-Feuille recipe, read it multiple times, rewatched the class video and set off.
The Bake
To start with, there are not many ingredients, all of which are in the pantry, excluding the optional garnish, which sadly I don't have any good fresh berries and mint. Meaning “a thousand layers” in French, the mille-feuille is known for its seemingly countless layers of puff pastry.
To the right is what I am aiming to make.
Layers of Rough Puff Pastry separated by Crème Mousseline filling.
After attending class, I felt so much better. This bake is not, but it does take time. There are several chill times for the dough and the filling.
There are 2+ hours for the dough and 2.5 to 3 hours for the filling. I would make the filling in between the dough make-chill-chill.
To keep the pastry from puffing, it is baked between two (2) baking sheets. The bake is 15-20 minutes, once cooled and assembled, time to eat! These can be refrigerated until ready to eat, but are best consumed the day they are made.
Courtesy of: Bake from Scratch Williams-Sonoma Mille-Feuille
The Result
Not Bad! I bit of a headscratch how the ended up different lengths when I used a ruler to cut them, but they are YUMMY! Overall, not that hard to do. The time worked out great, using planned work breaks to do the folds-turns and such. Made the day go faster and overall more enjoyable.
Make Again?
Yes! I have to try again with different flavors and garnish. I'm thinking Lemon, Cherry, ... oh the possibilities!
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