Cherry Choux Buns | Recipe
These afternoon tea cakes are super impressive yet simple to make - the perfect combination.
Transcript
00:00 Hello, my name is Andrew Garret from the Langham Hotel and we're going to make the Shoe Time Cake,
00:05 which is a shoe bun filled with a cream and a cherry on the top.
00:09 And now we're going to make the shoe pastry for the Shoe Time Shoe.
00:13 So we're going to boil milk and butter.
00:16 The salt and sugar.
00:26 What's really important with the shoe pastry is that we make sure that the butter is completely melted.
00:33 So now the milk and the butter is coming to the boil, just to make sure that the butter is completely dissolved.
00:39 And then we're ready to add the flour.
00:41 So you can add the flour all in one go.
00:43 I'm just going to mix it to a thick paste, so the gas is off here.
00:47 And there you can see that the paste is thick, everything is mixed well together.
00:52 And something that we are told to do with shoe pastry is to dry it out.
00:57 But as you can see, there's a steam coming already out of the mix.
01:00 If we turn the heat back on and dry out the shoe pastry, we tend to find that at the bottom of the pan is where the flour sticks.
01:07 And actually it's something we want the flour to stay within the mix because that's what absorbs the moisture.
01:12 So all I'm doing is just mixing it slowly using the heat that's already in the pan, just to dry, get rid of the excess moisture.
01:20 So I'll just do that for a minute or so.
01:22 And now we're ready to add the eggs gradually.
01:24 Now when you're adding the eggs in the shoe pastry, you add a small amount.
01:28 Mix it in to the dough and then you gradually add, gradually add, until you get it to the right consistency.
01:37 And you might find that with shoe pastry that you don't always add the same amount of egg.
01:42 It will all depend on maybe the flour that you're using, the amount of time that you've just left it to dry,
01:48 or if the liquid has evaporated too much at the beginning.
01:51 But you'll see that the shoe pastry is ready more when the texture is right.
01:56 What the egg does in the shoe pastry, it's the egg that's going to enable the puff or give the puff into the shoe pastry.
02:02 What you do have to be careful is not to add too much egg.
02:06 So one final mix to get a nice smooth and shiny paste.
02:09 Now we've got a shoe paste that's ready to pipe.
02:12 So now we've transferred the shoe pastry into a piping bag.
02:16 We've got a number 10 nozzle, so that's a 10mm nozzle.
02:19 And we're just going to pipe onto a silicone mat.
02:22 It's important to leave a big enough gap between, so obviously they will expand in the oven and puff up.
02:29 Just rolled some sweet pastry as thin as possible between sheets.
02:35 We've frozen it and then just cut it out into small discs.
02:39 We're going to put one of these on top of each shoe.
02:42 And this is going to give us a crunchy texture and it will also help to hold the shape of the shoe.
02:47 So we should have a nice round shoe once these have been baked.
02:50 We're going to do half that way and half without.
02:53 While the shoe is baking we're going to make the filling, which is the simple mousseline cream.
03:05 The first step is to mix the eggs with the sugar and the flour.
03:10 Something that's very important when you're making this cream is that you always mix the sugar and the eggs first.
03:17 What's very important is that the sugar dissolves in the egg.
03:20 If we don't dissolve the sugar in the eggs then the sugar will absorb the moisture of the eggs.
03:26 And what you'll be left with is the lumps of fat that are left in the egg yolk that don't ever disappear.
03:30 So you'll have a very lumpy cream.
03:32 Then we add the flour.
03:36 And in here we've got a mix of corn flour and flour so that it gives us a thickening agent
03:43 as well as an agent that will give a little bit of elasticity to the mix.
03:46 And then we're ready just to add it to the milk.
03:48 Now we're going to boil the milk for the base of the cream.
03:52 We're going to pour the milk in and bring it to the boil.
03:56 Now while the milk's boiling I'm just going to explain about the gelatine.
04:00 The gelatine that we're using is a powder that we've added water to.
04:04 So our base recipe for our gelatine mass as we call it is 1 gram of powder for 5 grams of water.
04:12 So the milk is boiling.
04:14 The gelatine is ready there.
04:16 And we're just going to take our eggs, sugar and flour that we mixed earlier.
04:21 And as the milk comes to the boil we're going to pour directly the eggs, the flour and the sugar into the mix.
04:30 Leaving the heat still on and we're just going to whisk that into our cream.
04:36 And you can see that it's going to thicken very very quickly to give us something that resembles a traditional pastry cream.
04:44 So now the pastry cream is cooked we're going to drop in the gelatine, turn off the heat and just dissolve the gelatine in the mix.
04:52 Now all the gelatine is dissolved, the cream is cooked, we're ready to put it into a container.
04:57 So now the cream has cooled down to 40 degrees.
05:00 You'll see that we've put a cling film on top.
05:02 And this cling film is just to stop any skin forming on top of the cream which will as well create a lumpy texture, grainy texture in the cream.
05:10 So the cream is at 40, our butter is just slightly softened.
05:14 We're going to add it into the cream and just whisk it in.
05:17 This is something that you can do the day before you need this cream.
05:21 And once this butter is dissolved into the cream we're just going to put it in the fridge and it can be left overnight or within a couple of hours it's ready to use.
05:30 So the choux have just come out of the oven, we've left them to cool.
05:33 As you can see they've kept a shape and they've got this textured finish which is the sweet pastry.
05:38 So we're just going to leave those there for now.
05:40 We've got the base of our mousseline cream, so the pastry cream with butter.
05:44 We're going to add a very small amount of mascarpone again too.
05:49 And also just a small amount of grated tonka.
05:52 So tonka, it's a bean, you tend to find it in Venezuela, can be used in perfume quite a lot to give you a vanilla scent.
05:58 So we've just the tonka, the base pastry cream and mascarpone, we're just going to whisk it together to get the texture that we want.
06:04 We're basically just making sure that there's no lumps of mascarpone in this cream.
06:12 As you can see a very quick mixing, so that we'll just leave here.
06:17 We're going to slice our choux.
06:19 In here we've just got a cherry jam, so it's cherries, quite a small amount of sugar and a little bit of pectin just to help to set it.
06:39 We're going to pipe into the base of our choux, it's just an addition to give us a slightly extra or a stronger cherry flavour in the choux.
06:47 You pipe into the base of each.
06:50 Then we're going to fill the piping bag with the mousseline cream and fill each choux with a good amount of cream.
06:56 And you can either just cover with the lid of the choux or just as decoration with the cherry.
07:06 And there we have the cherry choux tart.
07:09 [Music]