French Pastry Update

Photo Courtesy of demi, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

A Toast to Success! 

I have decided to postpone any further testing for the French Pastry experiment, and will instead focus on presentation. Yesterday when I opened the storage container with the remainder of the experiment, I was immediately alerted by the enticing aroma of French Pastry and transported back in time. It was as if I had an original French Pastry in my hand and had just opened the package. 

So, to test this out, I had to try another piece. It was stellar! I wasn't even thinking about "cure time" for the pastries, but that is exactly what they needed. I am over the moon about this. I hope it will bring others joy too, and soothe the palates of those who adored these sweet treats as much as I did. 

I'll post the exact recipe I used for each element in a future post, as well as the method & equipment I used. This is IT! My taste buds never fail me (except when they are knocked off the grid on occasion when I get a cold or flu). 

This is fabulous news for French Pastry lovers! I know they are out there because I have found posts lamenting the fact that they are gone and sadness because no one can find a decent recipe. 

I'm hoping to have some time this weekend to work on presentation. I wish I could email samples of these so people could try them. 

Wouldn't it be funny if Bimbo took the old recipe out of the "Mrs. Baird's Vault" and started churning them out all of a sudden? That would be pretty hilarious. 😂

On another note, there is at least one other food item I would love to conquer. Enchiritos. No, not the ones they put back on in recent years, (and I don't know if they are even still on the menu because I never go to Taco Bell anymore). I'm talking about the original Enchiritos from way back. They had a hybrid tortilla. Then they took it off the menu, and years later, when they brought it back, they used a boring, crappy flour tortilla. So that was a disappointment. Anyway,  the rest of the Enchirito ingredients aren't hard to emulate, but that hybrid tortilla...well, that's the holdup. But that is for another day. Today we enjoy French Pastry and celebrate a success! 

Photo Courtesy of Jackie RGarcia, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Recreating Mrs. Baird's French Pastry - Who Remembers This Delightful Snack Cake?

 I certainly remember. This is a discontinued dessert that still haunts my dreams sometimes. I consume it in the dreams, and I can taste it. Then I wake up and curse at Mrs. Baird's for discontinuing it. 

I remember when I used to ride my bike to the small convenience store we had in town, (one of the only ones, if not THE only one at that time), to buy a French Pastry and a comic book. I didn't do it every day, but I did do it pretty frequently. 

My grandma even attempted a recreation before. She knew how much I liked them. Her version was very good, but not the same.  

I still remember when I bought the last one. 1990. I was living in Houston at the time and not enjoying the city. I had no idea I'd be buying the last French Pastry I would ever buy. I would have bought a few more to enjoy, had I known. 

Mrs. Baird's discontinued the French Pastry long before Bimbo bought the company. I don't know what the reason was, but I used to bug the bread man about the recipe when he brought deliveries to the store where I was employed for a while. I even wrote the company years back, but no dice. 

Here is a pic of the original French Pastry. It was the only pic I could find on the internet. It is a little grainy, but it is all I could find after using many different key words & search strings. If you have a better pic, let me know, or please share it in the comments. 

Mrs. Baird's French Pastry

I have been trying to find time to experiment with recipes to recreate this fabulous snack cake. Yes, I can "throw down" and make an "adult" version with real cream, extra layers, and fancy new-gaws, but I'm looking for the authentic Mrs. Baird's French Pastry flavor. So I finally took the plunge, after hemming and hawing about it for some time. 

My experiment turned out to be VERY close to the right flavor. I believe I can nail it with just a bit more tweaking. Once I get that down,  I'll work on the aesthetics. The ones I constructed can be politely labeled as "rustic." 😂 If I had the nifty machine with a conveyer belt to run the things through a chocolate waterfall...hey, no problems then! But I don't, so I'm working with what I have. I'm posting my version below with different sizes and shapes. Go ahead and laugh. I did. 😂

Chocolate Coating: Too Thick!!!

For this one I simply spread the chocolate coating to harden 
on parchment paper and then broke it into pieces. It's a good 
version because the chocolate coating is thin.

Round version with crumbled chocolate & nuts

This round version has a "chocolate cap." It wilted a bit
overnight so it looked a little more authentic this morning.

The Baird's version was about 4" in diameter & covered with a chocolate "shell" topped with chopped pecans. I want to get as close to that as possible, not just the flavor, but the right texture. Biting into a French Pastry was a delight as well, with the chocolate coating crumbling into the creme as you took a big bite. I will probably end up just piping the tempered chocolate on & then adding the nuts. I didn't hollow the cakes either. I might do that next time. They work pretty well as-is. The closest to correct was actually the rectangular version above with the crumbled chocolate & nuts. It had the right balance of creme, nuts, coating, and cake. 

The "creme" filling was spot on. The coating is just a shade too sweet...I will have to use a different brand of chocolate for that. The base would benefit from a little less sugar too. The texture of the base was about right. It was "Devil's Food Cake." I always thought they used devil's food cake for the base, but I'm planning to try a couple of other versions for the base that use the foaming method. (It needs to be light, but not too light.) Devil's Food Cake might be the ultimate winner in the end. We shall see. I just have to make sure. 

It ended up being pretty darn close though, closer than I expected, so I can't complain too much.