Baking Disasters

By: Pete on 11:28:00

Didn't take many photos here, mainly as I was desperately trying to recover the bakes. I was attempting to make 2 things...a quiche, and a mille feuille. Lets go through what went wrong...

1) The Crème Patisserie was too thin. I used 5 egg yolks, 600ml of milk, 50g of cornflour, 40g butter and 125g of sugar. For the mille feuille, the custard needs to be fairly structural, so when I do this again I will probably use 2 egg yolks, and 2 whole eggs, then back to more "normal" volumes of 500ml of milk, 40g cornflour and 100g of sugar (then the same 40g of butter). I possibly

didn't quite cook it long enough, though it had definitely started to firm up as I was cooking it. I knew as soon as I took it out of the fridge it wasn't thick enough...it was dripping out of the piping bag, which is never a good sign.

2) The jelly didn't set. The above photo is of 400g of blueberries that have been blitzed in a food processor, run through a sieve, and then had 100g of sugar added before it's boiled up. I then added 2 bloomed sheets of gelatine.

2 SHEETS OF GELATINE IS NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH!!!

A bit of investigation tells me that a sheet of gelatin will set 100ml of liquid. I probably had closer to 400ml, and fructose is a gelatin inhibitor. 5-6 sheets would be what I'm looking for.

3) The rough puff was too thick, and brick-like. The recipe I was following had the rough puff held between 2 baking trays to keep it fairly firm...in retrospect this is not a good idea, and i'll let it expand naturally next time. I did a "normal" load (400g flour, 200g fats), and this was too much for my small baking trays...I should have rolled it thinner, or get bigger baking trays.

4) My shortcrust went weird. OK...this is the one I'm not so sure on. I did a "normal" load, which I've done several times before, using a food processor to do the bread-crumbing (300g plain flour, 120g butter), however after chilling it was very resistant to rolling, and ended up way too thick (5-6mm, when I normally got for 3mm). It cracked and crumbled, and baked very hard (probably as it was too thick).

My only saving graces are that the quiche filling was very nice, and the blueberry goop (sort of half-set jelly) has a lot of flavour. The creme pat, while liquid, still has that strong vanilla flavour. I was able to quickly do a sweetcrust shell (I had some left-over from my halfway successful bake from last night, which will get it's own post), which I put the blueberry into, and put the custard on top...it was un-cuttable, but it got the ingredients used!

The jelly and crème pat I know how to resolve. I think the puff pastry is solveable as well, simply rolling it thinner, and not doing the compression should be enough. I need to do shortcrust again, and soon, as I have no idea what went wrong there...