Category: pastry

i first saw david eyre’s pancake when it cropped up in the new york times last year and although i had it bookmarked for some time, i never got around to actually making it at home. this weekend i was in the mood for dessert for breakfast (i actually remember eating birthday cake for breakfast several times growing up so it’s nothing new for me), so i fired up the oven and whipped up one of these bad boys. it’s so light that it’s almost like eating a crepe, and the wow factor of an inflated pancake coming out of the oven just seals the deal. i will be making more of these in the very near future. and although it looks very delicate, it’s pretty idiot-proof.

traditionally, the pancakes are doused in lemon juice and sprinkled with a generous amount of confectioner’s sugar before serving. i upped the ante with a simple apple syrup that i first created on one cold morning a few years ago. i was looking for something that would warm me up, and i was bored with maple syrup. basically, you cook down apples until you have a sticky, sweet, bubbly mess in a saucepan, and pour it over anything you want to taste delicious.

let me start by apologizing for my lack of posts lately. moving into a new apartment coupled with a vacation in california (including a much-needed vacation from the computer) left me with little free time to bake. but now i’m back, wooden spoon in hand, ready to take on another recipe and make up for lost time. let’s get to it.

i had my first portuguese egg tart in america, but they did come from a portuguese bakery. during college, my old roommate’s mom came to visit for a few days, bringing with her boxes and boxes of pastries, including about 4 dozen egg tarts. let’s just say they didn’t last too long in our house. unfortunately, they’re not something you typically see in american bakeries, but if you look around a little bit, you’ll come across them.

pastéis de nata are thought to have been created by catholic sisters in a convent in lisbon. the convent belonged to the belém parish in lisbon, and so they are known there as pastéis de belém. pastéis de belém is also the name of a now world-famous pastry shop in lisbon, specializing in, of course, these egg tarts. my girl was lucky enough to eat there during her trek around europe last year and can attest to their incredible and well-deserved reputation. as for my tarts, she thought they tasted more like the chinese egg tarts you can get at dim sum places, which i am still happy with.

this week i used *gasp* store-bought puff pastry instead of homemade pastry dough. two reasons – i made these on a weeknight where time constraints kept me from dedicating the proper amount of time to a pastry dough and leaving me enough light for photos. secondly, i’ll be making a homemade pastry dough in a day or two for another recipe i can’t wait to make. and while store-bought puff pastry may make some of you cringe, the real star here is the creamy and decadent filling. if you’re going to sit and eat a dozen tarts at once (which is more plausible than it seems once you eat one), just avoid looking at the filling ingredients in the recipe. i’m almost glad i don’t have a neighborhood bakery churning these out – i’d be an extra 200 lbs by next month.

growing up, danishes were reserved for special occasions – in particular, christmas and easter morning breakfasts. these were never homemade danishes; they usually came in a big plastic container with bear claws and rugelach, but they were special nonetheless. i tried to recreate what i remember having as a kid, but it was surprisingly hard to track down a good recipe that didn’t start out with ready-made puff pastry. i finally found something that seemed to resemble what i was looking for in the Taste of Home Complete Guide to Baking, a gift from my mom.

this recipe has several parts to it, so i gave myself pretty much a whole day to tackle the danishes. it turned out to be especially challenging for me, mainly because it’s made with pastry dough, which is not something i often use. it was also my first time using shortening ever – i think i could have replaced it with cold butter, but i decided to stay faithful to the directions.

the danishes came out looking great (if i do say so myself), but the pastry was not nearly as flaky as i would have liked. i assembled these without a picture reference, basically wrapping lengths of dough into little birds-nest type holders for the cream cheese filling. you could probably replace the dough recipe below with puff pastry and just assemble these any way you think would look great, but it’s a great experience to work with a sweet yeast dough. to be honest, these didn’t quite live up to the store bought pastries i remember, but they came close.