Due to the winter break ending, I feel that it is my duty, as a blogger, to update my readers on my various baking exploits over the past two weeks or so. And by baking exploits, I mean the whopping amount of TWO things that I made. I’m aware that the purpose of this blog is to document my progress of making puff pastry, but I hope that you will all forgive me, as one of these two baked goods was not made from the beautiful confection of puff pastry. It was but a cake.
Thanks in part to labour and resource shortages across the world, the renovation on my house has reached the 7 month mark since its start, with little signs of completion in the future.So instead of spending Christmas in town, I went to Ottawa, to live with my Mom’s side of the family. I spent the first week of the holidays perfectly avoiding the puff pastry that I told myself that I would make. I was sitting down and just about to continue reading Green Grass, Running Water, when,
“Declan… come and help with the koolic!”
With a breath of annoyance, I rose from my seat and began lazily sauntering towards the kitchen. As you can probably tell, this cake is called koolic. I don’t mean to gatekeep or anything, and I would show
you the recipe, but it was on some 20 or 30 year-old piece of paper that looked like it would fall apart if you touched it too hard, and I took no pictures. The cake is essentially a 2-foot tall sponge loaded with dried currants and candied orange peels. It’s also about 10% rum. That being the main flavour that comes out of each bite. Topped with icing alongside more currants and orange peels, these cakes are a sight to behold. There may however be a slight bias towards that statement, as it did take a whole day to be completed. As expected, it was a huge hit, but not as big as my second exploit.
About two days later, seeing that I could not put it off any longer, I got to work on my puff pastry. I found a new recipe to use, and it was as bare bones as you can get. Butter, water, salt, flour. Nothing else. I did the usual: mix all the ingredients together, refrigerate, fold it a few times, freeze until use. It worked about as well as it usually does, with the lamination coming through nicely. As for what I decided to do with the puff pastry, I decided on danishes.
The origins of the danish begin in, you guessed it, Denmark. During a strike in the 1850s, Austrian bakers were brought in to account for non-working Danish bakers. The Austrian desert, Plundergebäck, became popular and was adapted into the Danish we know and love.
Danishes have a variety of fillings, usually jam, but I decided to do a kind of spin-off of the cheese danish. I say spinoff, because I used a recipe as a baseline, but ultimately did my own thing in the danish’s production. First, the recipe used store-bought puff pastry, which has a more consistent thickness that I can’t hope to replicate, so the baking time would be different. Secondly, I used a different filling than the recipe provided. Alongside the koolic instructions, on the same 30-year-old paper slip, was a recipe for a sweet cheese accompaniment, dubbed Paskha. Someone else made that while my Uncle and I made the koolic, and there was some left over, so I used it as a filling. I rolled out the pastry, and cut it into squares. I then put the filling inside, and folded the two opposite corners
together, sealing with an egg wash (one egg yolk, and a splash of water). Brushing the rest of the outside of the pastry with the remaining egg wash, I put them in the oven and let them bake, until golden brown. Outside of the oven, I sprinkled some powdered sugar over top.
I couldn’t wait until they were finished. While they were quite a bit away from being cooled enough so as to not burn my tongue, I dug in nonetheless. And what would you know, on the first bite, I burnt my tongue. However, that mild discomfort could not even begin to mask the pure perfection of taste and texture that this delectable pastry brought to my mouth. Perfectly crispy as all puff pastry should be, the cheese filling was creamy, sweet, with just a tiny bit of caramelization on the top. It was definitely the best thing that I have created so far. Each of the other puff-pastry delicacies that I made have had some sort of flaw, but this had none. Absolutely perfect. 10/10
Puff Pastry Recipe: https://thewoksoflife.com/easy-rough-puff-pastry/
Danish Recipe (loosely followed): https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/puff-pastry-danishes/
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