ffwD: Paris brest

Whenever I see pâte à choux, I automatically think whipped cream as a filling. Even after I saw “pastry cream” as the filling in this week’s recipe, I still thought “whipped cream”. I just feel like “pastry cream” is misleading (at least to me) because pastry cream’s texture is more like a pudding. So, in my mind, it should be called pastry pudding. But, whatever.

This week’s assignment, Paris brest, involved a simple pâte à choux dough piped in a circular pattern, baked with sliced almonds on top, and then filled with pastry cream. However, I didn’t have any sliced almonds on hand, so I skipped that part.

My dessert wasn’t as impressive as I thought it would be mainly because I didn’t pipe my choux dough high enough. Instead, I piped it 1-inch wide, making the circle too flat to slice in half. Good thing the recipe produced enough dough to make two circles. So, I improvised and used one circle for the base and the second for the top.

This Paris brest was made for French Fridays with Dorie, a group of bloggers who are cooking their way through Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours.