Testing a recipe Paris Brest Cake

The finished recipe was to look like a bicycle wheel.  It had pastry dough layers with a custard between the layers and was topped with a whipped cream hazelnut mixture. I have taken 50+ pictures and 4 videos of Marty and me testing this recipe.  This was a huge investment of time for us.  We spent hours on Sunday getting this cake ready to assemble.  Tonight we put all the parts together, sliced it, and tried to eat it.  Not good.  It went into the garbage.

I knew when we made the pastry dough it was not going to work.  I make cream puffs all the time and that is the type of dough this was.  The test recipe had way too much fat and liquid.  When it was piped into a circle, it spread, and when cooked it did not rise.  When we ate it, it was like shoe leather.

Marty is a very good cook.  He pipes food all the time.  He cooks pretty (I always say my cooking is all about the taste, but not pretty.)  He about died when he piped the pastry dough and it spread instead of standing up. I was upset that I had stirred this mess continuously for 15 minutes.  I switched arms and still felt like I needed my tendinitis arm braces.

I have filled out the survey and told them how bad the recipe was.  I will put some of the pictures in this blog, but not many and not the videos.  I will not waste your time as ours was wasted.

                                                             Stirring the praline topping

 Marty getting ready to pipe the pastry dough. 

 This is out of sequence.  Here I'm stirring the pastry dough for 15 minutes that Marty is putting in the bag above.

 This is the crushed hazelnut praline that was made, then crushed and added into whipped cream.

A slice of the cake.  You can see all the layers.

It was not a pretty cake, it did not taste good, and it totally wasted several hours of our time.