These were Mendl's
Courtesan au Chocolat.
Yes, Mendl's, a little pastry store located near the Grand Budapest Hotel in the (fictional) Republic of Zubrowka. Yes, I am talking about a movie by Wes Anderson. The movie was funny, cute and sentimental. It was definitely one of our favorite movies in 2014. There were many interesting scenes in the movie. One of them was, for me, Mendl's pastries that played an important role. They were lovely decorative pastries. Of course, I would love to taste it! I thought there must be some information about the pastries and searched on the Internet. Aha! I found a video to show how to make them on youtube. I watched the video a few times and also checked the screenshots of the pastry from the movie. I didn't follow the recipe of the video though. I adapted a recipe of cream puff from a Japanese cooking book for the puff dough and baked three different sizes of the puffs. They were nicely ballooned.
For the filling, I adapted a recipe of chocolate custard cream from another Japanese cooking book. I used Valrhona's 71% cacao chocolate from France. The cream was tasty by itself! The video didn't fill the smallest puffs with the cream, but I did to enjoy the cream in every layer of the puffs.
Baking goods decorated with poison-like colored cream or sugar spray are usually not my taste. But This time was an exception. I bought vegetable-based food color, which didn't provide vivid pretty color, especially blue. The blue was a kind of grayish blue, not a cute pastel baby blue. Well, I knew I won't get the right color, but chose food safety over color accuracy. I didn't adapt any specific recipe of decorative icing/cream. Instead, I made up the sugar icing and butter cream by mixing powdered sugar, milk, soften butter and vanilla extra. Tinting the icing and cream with a few drop of the color liquid was a fun part.
Assembling was a nightmare. I didn't have fine piping tools. So I used what I had in hand, including ziplock plastic bag. The result wasn't as fancy as I hoped. Oh, well. Moreover, because the top of some puffs wasn't flat enough to hold another on the top, the every puff tower was collapsed at least once. While I was reconstructing the puff towers, several spots of the decorative icing and butter cream got messy. Unfortunately I didn't have extra cream as well as extra time to fix those spots. Oh, well.
I topped the towers with a crystalized violet pedal. In the movie, a coffee bean were on the top, which I didn't have. Anyway the purple violet was cute and looked elegant on my version.
Although I can't compare those with Mendl's, which is "the best" according to M. Gustave H, my version tasted pretty good. I served them as Christmas desserts. One tower per person. At the dessert time, we were watching a movie and the TV room was a little dark. In the situation, I assumed nobody didn't pay attention on some messy parts. In terms of the taste, I was afraid that it may be too sugary with the external icing and cream, but actually it wasn't too bad, I thought. Eating with a fork was challenging. I used my hand. I was happy with the result. And happier to know J liked it!
