Series 6, Episode 10, Raspberry millefeuille
This bake is the final bake from Series 6, which has taken over a year for me to complete. I’ll aim for at least 2 series for 2024.
Here’s the recipe: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/raspberry_millefeuille_60382
I started off making the rough puff pastry. This was a bit of a disaster – I think I added the water too slowly meaning that I had to work the dough for longer than I should have. I also don’t think I added enough water, it was a very stiff dough. Here it is just before resting:
I had to bake in batches because I don’t have enough baking trays, since there were 3 sheets of dough with a baking tray also over the top. Because of this, I got distracted while the last pastry sheet was in the oven and I burnt it a bit. It also seemed to take longer to bake than the recipe said so I ended up taking the top baking tray off after they’d been in there for about 10 minutes.
Next I had to cut them into rectangles. There was absolutely loads of pastry left over but not quite right for me to be able to re-do some of the pieces which had broken. I managed to miss out the most burnt bits though. Here are my best rectangles laid out ready to start assembly:
The 6 remaining (and worst) ones were put aside to go on the top.
Making the jam was really simple. I used a sugar thermometer but I’ve made it before without one and it turned out fine. It was still slightly warm when I spread it onto the pastry but I think that just made it easier to spread. I had absolutely loads of jam left over so probably would have just made half the amount if I’d known.
Next was the cream and raspberries. The photo on the website showed 6 raspberries per layer, meaning 12 per cake. However, the recipe only said to use 48 raspberries, meaning 8 per cake, so that’s what I did.
I also had an excess amount of cream leftover, despite me making high blobs and adding a cream cross in the middle. I’d say I could have again made half the amount.
Assembling them wasn’t too tricky. Because a lot of my tops had broken I could just stick them to the fondant so it didn’t really matter. Here is one finished:
You can see the double blob of cream where I’ve gone back and added more and the broken top piece.
They tasted good but the pastry was a bit dense and too much work. I think this is one of those where buying the ready made pastry is a better idea, it will taste better and a lot less effort. It just goes to show that they do make the final technical challenge very difficult, and definitely do not give enough time (they only had 2 hours and it took me about 3).
I have loads of little pastry cut-offs, jam, cream, raspberries and icing left so I can use those to make an Eton Mess variant.
I’ll get started with Series 7 really soon.
Lily
