In all honesty I have no idea how to better call this desert… a tarte? A Danish? Johnny? I will be calling it Thing-a-Majing until one of you good folk comes up with a different name for it. Inspiration comes from something I’ve seen Spencer Watts do, but it is pushed further and in a slightly different direction. This is something which happens quite a lot … little gears in the cooking side of my brain start spinning and I got to do what they say, with mixed but mostly good results.
This time around the result earned universal acclaim in Casa Radu, that is including from my Mom-in-Law which is rare, considering her Type 2 diabetes, thus her having a propensity of avoiding any deserts I’m trying my hand at, even though I make really good efforts to produce really balanced sweets which are not all that sweet.
Anyway, this Thing A Majing earned its place in a pretty special celebration, one which we hold for my dearly departed Papi, my late Father-in-Law. It’s a new family tradition which he suggested, specifically having a bottle of good Champagne on his birthday to remember the good times we had together. Now, having just Champagne on an empty stomach goes directly against Papi’s “Bon Viveur” creed and the “good living” Casa Radu principles he was instrumental in setting, therefore we added some stuff to gobble, this and that, including this particular desert, all “pour la bonne bouche”. So now we got the proper setting to remember his great, wise and magnanimous soul.
It does look like a large ingredient huddle but if we split them into categories, it all become quite simple really. In the “filling” category we have cream cheese, 35% whipping cream and creme fraiche, which we will use to make two “fillings”. For sweeteners we have raw plantation sugar and maple syrup. For aroma we have cardamom and lime zest but the maple syrup and the berries will contribute their own, of course. And of course we have store bought puff pastry. See? Not all that complicated.
A good stand mixer is a Godsend in this case. Here I’m making the cheese cream mix, out of cream cheese, creme fraiche, sugar and cardamom. Once done, I washed down the bowl and made the “whipped cream” in it. For that I used 35% cream and creme fraiche sweetened with a hint of maple syrup. My stand mixer made short work out of those tasks, they were done in mere minutes.
Two little things to share here. First, whipped cream comes together much easier if all the ingredients are cold, as cold as possible. Whipping it to hard peaks while adding maple syrup to it becomes almost trivial.
The second thing is about the maple syrup in case here. Its aroma degrades as the syrup heats up and disappears almost completely past its boiling point. There’s a good reason I haven’t use it in the cheese cream mix as that will go in the oven. There’s also a good reason why good maple syrup should be kept in the fridge… In any case if you’re making anything on the stovetop or the oven you’re better off with sugar or molasses instead and if you must have the maple aroma, you better figure out a way to incorporate it later, once whatever you’re making has cooled down significantly. Anyway…
I split the puff pastry in 4 portions and I used a sharp knife to set some superficial, maybe 1 millimetre deep margins on each of those, will see why in a jiffy.
Inside those margins we’re setting the cheese cream. One can definitely do a better job than I did with an offset spatula, however micrometer precision is not what I’m after, but rather a more “handmade” look. A little sprinkle with raw sugar and in the pre-heated oven it goes, on the lowest rack. My oven was set on baking at 375F.
Here it is after around 20 minutes in the oven, all nicely puffed and browned, with a little crust on the cheese. As you can see, only the surroundings of the cream have risen and now trap it inside. By putting it on the lowest rack all of the bottom has a chance to actually cook. We set the tray aside to cool nicely before the final assembly.
Ah! Every time I work with puff pastry I’m left with either corners or little unusable strips which I stretch then roll a little bit of something in it and bake along the main dish. The result is a little starter, amuse bouche sized as the French say. The filling for these is either some melting cheese or ham or a combination of both or a little piece of leftover something… Whatever the combination, my little beloved “gators” love these things.
And here it is, the Thing-a-Majing fully assembled. I’ve set blueberries and raspberries over the cheese cream, a good dollop of that whipped cream followed, topped with yet more blueberries and raspberries plus a lime zest garnish. It is the kind of desert which is a bit sweet, a bit savoury, a bit sour, but full of great complementing aromas. It goes down nicely too helped by all the different textures present. My Mom-in-Law mentioned that this desert is good, professional patisserie level. Wow, that felt incredibly good as this sort of praise comes from her about as often as rain in the Atacama desert. Positively chuffed, I am.
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