Gateau St Honore

Gateau St Honore: 6-inch diameter puff pastry in the bottom topped with mini chocolate-cream-puffs, egg-enriched cream, decorated with editable silver beads, chocolate "fans" and powder sugar

Single-serving version: 5cm x 20 cm long pastry garnished with sliced strawberry. But I suggest making it wider since puff pastry might not rise evenly, the tilting on a narrower structure will be more noticeable

Around this date of each month our Daring Bakers are presenting you our show-piece with sweat and pride! This month our challenge is Gateau Saint Honore*. Whether you are daring, this cake is really less complicated than I expected. Please head over to Helen's blog and check for the full recipes.

Like every of you, when approach a recipe, first things come to my mind are "time" and "difficulty level". A great thing about this cake is, the puff pastry and pate a choux (dough for cream puffs) can be made days ago. So on the finale you probably don't have much to do other than building blocks. About skill level, Helen opens an option for switching to store-bought puff pastry. I already had mine home-made, but still had a, actually two hesitations about pate a choux since which was my first time to make: 1. Was told that dough easily failed to rise; and 2. it's my own issue. I used to dislike cream puffs as they're too dry to my taste. If you know me well, I only eat cakes or pastries that are very rich.

* According to an info provided by Helen, May 16 is Saint Honore (pronounced o-no-ray) that there is a very traditional cake named after him : Gateau Saint Honore. Its building goes like this: base of puff pastry plus rings of cream dough, topped with cream puffs and hot caramel. Cream filling to fill everything.

To ensure my pate a choux to puff up, first and foremost, was to read Helen's recipe very, very, very carefully, and look up a couple of cookbooks. Interesting, none of them has any concern on rising, seemingly implies that it must come along (thank goodness so as mine). The authors emphasized very much on getting the dough to the exact consistency instead, not sure if it attributes to the expansion, or its final texture, or both.

Considering pate a choux I couldn't stop myself but go for a richer chocolate pate a choux. It is almost the same as Helen's recipe, except replacing half of the water with whole milk, and of course, in addition of chocolate. I also wanted my puffs extra moist; two minutes before baking I threw in three ice cubes onto the bottom of my oven, shut the door immediately in order to create and trap in steam.

Sorry my darling fellows, the caramel show-piece is missing on my cake as last minute something suddenly came up (we're gonna move...); I got to stop after piping the cream which even lacked time in setting. Still, up to here the cake was good enough to make me sing and dance whole day! Which is the most delicious part? The bite all the way from cream puff, cream down to puff pastry! It is arrestingly delicious, moist, creamy, crispy and chewy at the same time! Daring Baker's challenge makes me think out of the box (before never thought of combining puff pastry and cream puffs), and walked out my comfort zone (never says never!). And I'm so proud each of you DB to take this challenge and accomplish it beautifully! *Big Kiss*

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