Puff Pastries: Inspired by miette

Hey guys, I lied a little.  Well no, I lied a lot.  Instead of properly preparing for Colombia by only eating lettuce and dustballs for the last three weeks, I have been eating big ol' burgers and  lots of  fancy artisan ice cream instead.  It's hot and ice cream is good okay?  Can ice cream be my spirit animal?  Is that possible?  Or just weird? Oh it's definitely weird... okay, I was just kidding anyway.

This last minute treat was completely justified though.  It was a baking date with the fair Rachelle and it allowed me to get some quality time in (with her and a toy I hadn't played with before) AND have something to blog out!  Win-win. She emailed me, suggesting eclairs and it only made sense to proceed with our endeavour since we had both bookmarked a recipe in our miette cook books ages ago.  I first went to miette  about two years ago and fell in love with their colors and decor, the whole shop and of course... the pastries!  We each have our own copies.  They both came in handy.

I was reminded of a very important life lesson on our date.  You can't always be perfect.  And that's okay because chocolate ganache and sprinkles can, in fact,  fix most anything.

This applies to broken hearts (obviously) or puff pastries.  But today I am talking about the latter.  Neither of us had made puff pastries before.  We certainly did not excel at our task.  We did quite a few things wrong, actually.

Our biggest mistake was assuming that we knew better than our cook book.  We were directed to pipe the puff pastry into 5x1 inch strips using a 1/2 inch diameter piping tip.  We used math and convinced ourselves that they must have meant TWO strips. Two strips of dough would bake itself together, right?

Wrong.  As evidenced above, we ended up with really big donuts... that could be divided into two.  Like one of those popsicles from childhood.  I get strawberry, you get orange but we break them in half and share!  Not much of a pretty sight to see.

And piping into them was much of a disaster since they didn't fluff up properly and we had to fill them in at least two places!  Pastry cream all over the place!  At least I got to use my cool little machine though...

Yet we had a great time laughing over our mistakes and then trying our best to fix them.  This is where we were saved by chocolate and sprinkles, the real heroes of today's story.

We zig zagged the ganache instead of dunking them.  (Bonus:  You can see the vanilla bean specks!)

We added some straight-from-miette sugar flowers to the prettiest ones.  ... and ta-dah.

We had eclairs!

We had cream puffs!

Sure there's a few flaws in them but thats okay!  At the very least TWO of them looked and photographed wonderfully,right?  ;)  Plus they were delicious. Just like an eclaire should taste like.   And we had an awesome afternoon.  We didn't let puff pastries defeat us!

I am quite confident that for our next date, Rach and I will master our technique and I will bring something even prettier to share!

xoxo,
Anna

(For the recipe, I encourage you to buy the miette book and follow the directions properly. I don't like to post exact recipes from books, nor will I post recipes when I don't think I have the recipe down enough.  Soon though, soon!)

I Finally Went To miette!

I was going to be totally good this week.  And i was.. mostly.  But then a friend asked me to go to miette with him on our lunch hour.

You see, I don't know if i have mentioned this before but i work in downtown San Francisco. (The FiDi  to be exact.)  Most of the time, i'm grumpy because its early and i am at work and its cold.  It's always cold.  But every now and then i step outside and breathe in the SF air and actually take a look around and i realize what an awesome city it is.

I also realize this when i step out for a ten minute break and go shoe shopping.  I do that a lot, actually. 

So today instead of spending my lunch time shopping i got talked into going down to the Embarcadero, to the ferry building.  The ferry building houses a ton of cute little shops and restaurants and markets. 

Outside they even have a farmers market and food tents set up on certain days.  Yeah - it's the dead of winter right now and they are still there.  It's 62* and sunny in the city today.  Yeah you can be a little jealous.   Anyways, inside the ferry building is miette patisserie.  they are one of the places that i have been meaning to try.  it's one of those requirements of living in the bay that i somehow failed to meet.  

I was actually a little surprised by their store front.  I thought it would be a little bigger.  (I have been to the outside of the Oakland location and that one was bigger.)  But i guess i cannot be surprised.  All the shops there are pretty tiny.

But man what it lacks in size, it sure makes up for it in pure cuteness.  love at first sight.  i want to live there, real talk.

Everything is so adorable!  The cute little pastel cake stands are to DIE for and have convinced me to buy my own pink one later this month.

I love all the perfectly written signs and all the packaged sweets.

They have all sorts of goodies here.  They have cookies.  They have chocolate.  They have cakes.  They have whipped cream in a jar!  I honestly don't even know what that whipped cream in a jar thing is except that i want to photograph it. And eat it.

They also had birdies.  And you guys know me.  I love me my birdies.  These hold napkins.  WHERE CAN I FIND THIS IN REAL LIFE.  No, really.  WHERE???

They also have cupcakes.  Yummy looking ones at that.  HOWEVER i did not get one today!  Surprising, i know.

My trip to miette was not for the cupcakes though.  It was for the macaroons.  The friend i went with is a big fan.  And so i bought the ones below.  Well, not all the jars.  Just one of each.  (Blue Bottle) Coffee and Chocolate Orange.  He got three Hazelnuts.

Then we went outside to eat them.  Where i was once again reminded how awesome SF is.  I really need to start walking around the Embarcadero on my lunch time more.  Because the sights are admittedly much prettier than the mall is.  

 So back to the macaroons that were wrapped and sealed.  I love stickers.

They were good!  I was expecting more fruity flavors to be honest, so i was a little worried about my choices but i ended up liking them all.  The orange chocolate was interesting and took a minute to get used to, but they were still all really good.

I'd be interested in checking out more flavors though.  They seem to rotate them out.  So maybe in a few weeks?  And while i am there i could eat a cupcake too.  Oh and once, my co worker brought me back some chocolate covered gummi bears that were delicious... Want to join me?

xoxo,
Anna