Kouign Amann, take 1.

This is a classic example of one of those, trust your gut lessons. And, in this case, don't always trust the celebrity chef.

I have had this recipe for Kouign Amann bookmarked on my computer ever since I tasted it for the first time at Honore Bakery in Seattle. It was quite possibly the best pastry I had ever eaten, and this includes all 100,000 chocolate croissants that I have consumed. I haven't had a lot of free time over the last 4 years, but I am starting to reclaim it slowly and surely. Yippee. So, the other day on a whim, while one kiddo slept and the other was at school, I clicked on the bookmarked tab and started mixing dough. As I looked at the recipe, I had my hesitations, but it was a blog written by David Lebovitz, a well known pastry chef, so I plunged forth. My hesitation was this: the Kouign Amann I had tasted was a flaky, chewy, crispy piece of buttery sugary heaven with a touch of sea salt. My guess was that they use some sort of laminated dough. Not sure what this is? think croissant. lots of layers of butter and dough, delicately folded and rolled over and over again. this creates pockets, flakes in the crust. The David Lebovitz recipe was like, throw some butter and sugar on the dough, fold it some, roll it a little. At one point he even states that if it falls apart to just push the dough back together. I found myself thinking that my Chef teachers at the CIA would laugh if I had done this with a delicate and lovely croissant dough. This was no delicate and lovely croissant dough. This was like lazy man's croissant dough. (not trying to be elitist here. croissant dough is just way more labor intensive, with good reason!) So, I guess I wasn't surprised at the result. But, as I was trudging ahead, I kept thinking, 'well, it is a David Lebovitz recipe...so it has got to be good, right?'

Um, wrong.

just wrong.

I don't know, maybe this is the real Kouign Amann and the version I had was an improvised version (and much superior, I might add)

So, if you are looking for a lovely, light, layered, flaky, buttery, sugary and crispy pastry, this is not it.

On the other hand, if you want something that is heavy, crispy on top with some decent caramelization, super doughy, butter leached out of the dough and into the bnottom of pie pan.. eek. barf.

I will say that this was edible, sort of. I mean, when is sugar, butter and dough not edible, right? Well, this was on its way to hitting the dirty diapers in the garbage when my husband came in the kitchen to tell me that he actually liked it.

Tomorrow, I may have to introduce him to the real thing.



The Dough before layering.

The finished product. doesn't look too bad. Looks can be deceiving.

A dud.

A huge part of baking is improvising and testing out recipes, fine tuning the good ones into excellent ones and just crossing the bad ones off your list. I had some plums in the house from my produce delivery, and like apricots, I just don’t eat plums raw. It is that same thing as with apricots, the tart skin that gets me every time. I am starting to think that maybe I just don’t like tart. So, I found a recipe from this great book with a beautiful and delicious looking photo of a plum cake. It looked like a coffeecake, and the plums were juicy and oozy..almost caramel like. I decided to bake it for T’s arrival home this week.

I started to wonder if the baking goddesses were hinting at something when I discovered a LARGE spider crawling out from underneath the pages of my recipe book only to disappear into the endless wicker of my desk chair. (Three days later, and I think that he is still there) Then, the moment after I committed myself to baking the cake, I realized that I didn’t have any regular sugar in the house. (for which I subbed brown sugar) Then, when I went to melt the last of my butter, all perfectly measured out, it blew up into a fat bomb all over my microwave, giving me less than the amount that I needed. (for which I subbed olive oil)

I just wasn’t feeling it, the love, the rhythm, the good feelings when you know that you are making something that kicks a**. It was more of a ho-hum feeling. A ‘Gee, I hope this doesn’t taste terrible’ feeling. It just wasn’t looking good.

So, I shouldn’t have been at all surprised, when I pulled the cake, hot from the oven, cut myself and big wedge, and ho-hum.

It was ho-hum boring.

I suppose that it could have nothing to do with the recipe, from which I had completely strayed, but I feel hesitant to waste the time on it again, when I know that there are much better recipes in my note book, tried and true.

the cake, 4 days later. I finally threw it out.