I have just completed the first week of my 6 month professional Masterclass of cuisine and pâtisserie at Lenôtre in Plaisir, France. Created in 1971 by the father of French cuisine Gaston Lenôtre, the school offers its students the chance to be taught by a first class team of chefs and pâtissiers including 8 Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, (I had never really understood why the French have a reputation for being ‘unkempt’ until I found myself in the kitchen surrounded by a bunch hairy old MOFs) as well as week long ‘chef’s signature’ courses by the likes of Joël Robuchon and Frédéric Anton.

On our first day we were ushered into a room, handed our full chefs get-up, warned that we would all gain 5 kilos by the end of the 6 months, and told matter-of-factly that being a chef isn’t really a very female friendly profession and perhaps us girls should consider ‘persevering with pastry’.

And on that very French note, we started our introduction to pâtisserie.

First up was the pâte à choux (choux pastry), which is the light fluffy pastry used to make profiteroles, éclairs and the like.  This is apparently the “easy pastry” (lets face it, in the spirit of  bad pastry puns, if there was ever going to be an “easy pastry” it would probably be the tart), however for someone who originally thought it was called ‘shoe pastry’ I am not surprised I encountered a few initial hurdles.  The pastry itself didn’t present too many difficulties, unless of course you were following the English translation of the recipe.  The translations range from the plain incomprehensible (“mix quickly to avoid the creation of a speck”, “melanger the liquid in a leaf to get a crea” or the best “after 2am of cold in 5 degrees to hunt (chase away) gases may keep (preserve) until the next day”), to the rather cute (“place apricots around the tart like ears”), to the downright bizarre (“stir in a pot and then go to China”). 

Incidentally the word for a sieve in French is “un chinois” which unfortunately also means “a chinese person”; needless to say by the end of the first week the poor Chinese girl in the class grew very tired of answering ‘yes I am here’ every time someone asked where the chinois was.

But the real trick lay with the piping bag (which for the record is most definitely not called “une pipe”, as I learned the hard and embarrassing way).  The piping bag must be held in a certain way so as not to overheat the pastry; when finishing a profiterole the nozzle must rest in the middle of the pastry so as to create an elegant apostrophe and not a dog-crotte like catastrophe; and each éclair must be exactly the same length, width and height. Four trays and two piping bags later and I really was about ready to go to China – this was the veritable Taming of the Choux.

So the question that begs to be asked is, who ate all the pies?

xoxo

Paris Stilton

Here are a few of my favourite sweet treats that you should never feel guilty about.

Pierre Hermé 

Hermé is to macarons what Hermès is to silk scarves. The man.

Years ago on a trip to Paris, it was pouring with rain and I ducked into a little boutique in St Germain to ask for directions to the famous macaron store Ladurée.  The female shop-owner leaned over and said to me “Mais non, Mademoiselle if you really want to be like the French you must go to Pierre Hermé.” And there they were, hordes of Frenchmen standing in a line in the rain, getting soaked for a bite of an exquisite Infiniment Chocolat, a morsel of a mouthwatering Médélice or, like me, to devour a divine Désiré.

Mogador, a macaron with a tangy passionfruit shell and molten chocolate middle was my absolute favourite…until I came across the supersize me Ispahan; a large rose and raspberry flavoured macaron with fresh raspberries encircling a luscious lychee centre. Despite its size, this is not one to share.

Jacques Genin

During a weekend of degustations and debauchery, after a 3 course meal at Bistrot Paul Bert, and a little charcuterie and wine at Le Verre Volé , my friend Foodie Dostoyevsky thought we needed to sample something sweet. So we headed off to Jacques Genin for the famous mille-feuille à emporter (unsurprisingly we came out with a mille-feuille, a Paris Brest, a chocolate éclair, some profiteroles, a tarte aux pommes and some little salted caramel butters for the road).

The atmosphere is a tad sterile; the light, clean, cave-like interior looks like it should be showcasing works of art or designer jewellery. But you quickly feel at home when you notice most of the happy clientele have pastry crumbs, icing sugar or chantilly cream all over their face.

If you order the mille-feuille (you must), the cream is piped into the crispy layers of pastry before your eyes.  It is buttery and delicate and scrumptious and incredibly hard to eat gracefully, while the Paris Brest, a praline cream centred choux pastry, tastes like an enormous middle of a Ferrero Rocher.

At €110 a kilo, you would hope the little caramels au beurre salé (salted caramel butters) were out-of-this-world amazing…and they are.

Lets not beat around the bouche here, if you eat these delectable delights in vast quantities, you too may start to look more Boticelli than Giacometti.

But you will enjoy every bite along the way.

xoxo

Paris Stilton