Roll up your sleeves, be a French pâtissier!

Baking the French way is an operation quite similar to heart surgery. Those pâtissiers don’t accept any inaccuracies, their list of ingredients is to be respected exactly (“…add 32 gr of almond powder…”), their temperatures are not suggestions (“…let cool to 50°C…”) and their given times shouldn’t be ignored (“…bake for 22 minutes…”).

I’m not so much into baking, actually, for these above reasons. Cooking the salty stuff serves me better because you don’t have to play by the rules all the time. But yesterday, all of a sudden, I heard an inner voice, saying: Why not prepare a fancy French raspberry tarte, it’s June after all, even if the weather’s more like, say, november? And so it was…

First, I studied my books by Pierre Hermé, supposedly the greatest pastry chef of all times, then I got to work: made a pâte sucrée working until my right arm felt numb, made a real crème pâtissière, that’s a whisking-work-out – and here’s how all of that looked. We haven’t eaten it yet; but it looks great, don’t you think? And it should taste great.

PS, five hours later: It DID taste great but the crème turned out to be quite runny…