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Home » Recipes » Pies/Pastry/Puddings

Paris-Brest - A Daring Baker's Challenge

December 4, 2014 by sblades 1 Comment

 Ahhh, the holidays. Every year I have such lofty goals of baking and shopping for the perfect Christmas gift.  And every year I work up until midnight of New Years Eve because of crashed computers or projects which need to be done while offices are empty.

You'd think I'd anticipate it, but I can still dream. I am thankful for the work though, and I do have pretty nice customers.

All that to say this: I'm a week late posting the recent Daring Baker's Challenge. The November Daring Baker’s challenge took us for a ride! Luisa from Rise of the Sourdough Preacher challenged us to make Paris-Brest, a beautiful pastry celebrating the Paris-Brest bicycle race.

Apparently in 1910, an ambitious pastry chef in Paris decided the bicycle race needed a pastry named after it in the shape of a bicycle wheel. Those silly French...but it did make for a nice pastry!

Paris Brest Long

This was my first attempt at pâte à choux, which is the basis of tons of French pastry recipes; in particularly the "real" eclair (not the kind at Dunkins).

It's easy to throw together and, although probably a little thinner that it should have been, piped out nicely on my pencil-drawn bicycle wheel circles.

Paris Brest 1

I'm thinking this piping thing is going to take practice because my tires looked a little flat. They baked up beautifully golden brown, but flattened out a little too much.

That's OK - after carefully cutting them horizontally, I piped (again with the piping) in the praline mousseline (uh, yum, another new fattening thing I needed to know about), sprinkled it with powdered sugar and dug in.

Paris Brest

It was wonderful, somewhat like an eclair with a wonderful nutty creme filling. I did have a go-around with the filling (carmelized nuts, ground into a paste and folded into a creme) and had to add whipped cream to make it thick enough to pipe onto the pastry.

I'm so excited to have learned to make the pâte à choux and we really enjoyed this delicious pastry.

It's a fun site to browse. Here's the recipe link (it's a formidable recipe) if you would like to try it: RiseoftheSourdoughPreacher

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Comments

  1. Lou

    December 05, 2014 at 1:00 pm

    Mmmmh I love the look of your filling, so silky!
    Wonderful job, thank you so much for taking the challenge 🙂
    Lou

    Reply

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Welcome!  I'm Susan and I love finding wonderful new recipes.  I hope you'll find a few new ones here that you and your family will love. Browse around and stay a while!Save

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