Like most professional cooks that I know, the more time I spend immersed in recipes and cooking at work, the less I want to spend in my little kitchen at home. My transgression from kitchen to office for the role of cookery school manager 18 months ago only seemed to heighten this anomaly as my free time started to disappear and my diet rapidly turned to meals that could be assembled in the 5 minutes it takes to run a bath after another late finish.
It is with enormous pleasure and relief that I have have finally started to settle into the role and have managed to bring about a slightly healthier work-life balance. With the long-awaited appearance of the sun this weekend, I decided that my kitchen cupboards could do with a bit of a clear-out but abandoned that plan as soon as I came across this very sorry looking bag of nibbed sugar. Having found it nigh on impossible to get hold of in the UK, nibbed sugar (also known as pearl sugar) had been on my extensive shopping list of interesting ingredients for a good few years and it wasn't until I took a trip to Paris with a boyfriend who could bear traipsing around its foodie havens that I finally managed to get hold of this elusive product. Prior to our trip I had managed to negotiate a carefully planned morning at Les Halles, and we set off on the day armed with an itinerary that combined my selfish needs with a slap up lunch for the patient escort.
As could have been predicted, my unbounded enthusiasm on the day (See picture above) had dwindled by my return and this bag has doggedly moved with me from flat to flat for the past few years, languishing in my cupboards alongside an enormously expensive tin of pistachio paste that I bought on the same trip.
With memories of springtime Paris flooding back I decided to start my adventures in nibbed sugar with the most simple of snacks, chouquettes. These little buns are bought by the dozen from bakeries all over France and are a cheap and satisfying treat for sunny afternoons.
Choux pastry features in both our Cooking with Confidence and Two Day Pastry courses, we even have a gluten-free choux recipe coming up in June's class with Adriana Rabinovich which I am fascinated to learn about. It is one of those things that seemingly daunting, is an absolute doddle once somebody has shown you how. Trying to make choux buns from a cookbook when I was a teenager was a fairly traumatic experience. I ambitiously set out to make a Croquembouche and ended up with a binful of limp and chewy pancakes, swearing then that I would never again waste my time with such a soul-crushing hobby. It was only when I faced my demons at catering college that learnt what consistency to look for and thankfully have never had to look back!
For these, I followed Flavia Rowse's profiterole recipe on the Divertimenti website, glazing the piped buns with a little egg wash before smothering them with nibbed sugar and baking as instructed in the recipe. If you have difficulty finding nibbed sugar, you can get a similar effect using broken up sugar cubes. Chouquettes are most delicious when freshly baked. If you do somehow find that you haven't managed to get through them all in one session, you can always give them a quick blast in a hot oven the following day to bring them back to life.
Try it out for yourself, or if you need a helping hand then you know where to find us!
Gloria
Gloria's Itinerary (+Click image to enlarge)