Joyeux Noël

 

Merry Christmas everybody!!  We made a fancy dessert for Christmas Eve dinner, called a Paris-Brest.  What, your family doesn’t make elaborate French pastries for Xmas??  This recipe is courtesy of our favorite magazine, Cook’s Illustrated.  According to the magazine, this dessert is  a classic Christmas Eve concoction in America.  Funny, I’ve never heard of it before!  It was created in the early 1900’s in honor of the Paris-Brest-Paris bicycle race.  The pastry is shaped like a bicycle wheel, and even features a pastry “inner tube.”  More on that later.

Here’s the pastry filling.  I won’t bore you with the details of how we made it (because I didn’t take pictures of it, and I’m also lazy).  It consists of a hazelnut “praline” and lots of butter and cream.  I originally tried to make the entire thing dairy-free, but it turns out our grocery store doesn’t sell whipping cream substitute.  Darn it!  I was forced to take a dairy-free holiday (or free of dairy-free) for Christmas.  Anyway, this has a really nice hazelnut flavor.  Like Nutella, only creamier and without chocolate.  OK, fine, it’s nothing like Nutella.

  

Next I made classic pastry dough, called pâte à choux.  Again, I didn’t take any pictures of it.  It consists of butter, flour, eggs, cream.  I then used a piping bag to make 2 rings – a small inner ring (representing the inner tube of the bicycle wheel) and the larger outer ring, which got decorated with chopped hazelnuts.  Into the oven until nice and brown.

 

Outer ring gets sliced in half…

 

…and filled with hazelnut cream.

The smaller pastry ring then goes on top.  Alas, my smaller ring was too small!  I had to cut it in half just to make it fit inside.  So there are a couple gaps where there is no inner tube.  This bicycle wheel is defective!

More hazelnut pastry cream.

And then we put the top piece back on. 

Ta-da!

So good, I barely managed to get a picture of what was left before everyone ate it.  It’s nice and light, even though it looks decadent.  There were 5 of us, and we ate the WHOLE THING.  No leftovers = success!