Deany’s Mille feuille
This is my version of a French classic. I poured over various versions of this recipe and there was something in every one of them that was wrong for me. So this is mine, easier, no fiddly faffing about and I’m really pleased with the end result.
Recipe
- 500g puff pastry
- 4 tbsp icing sugar
for the filling
- 100g icing sugar
- 50g softened butter
- 2tbsp fresh cream or milk
- ½ tsp vanilla essence
- 2-3 tbsp warm jam
for the topping
- 2tbsp icing sugar
- 1 tbsp fresh cream
- 3 or 4 squares of melted chocolate
Method
Preheat the oven to 200°/FAN180°/GAS 5
Get a sheet of non stick baking paper and cut it roughly the size of a regular baking tin and sprinkle it with icing sugar. Plonk your pastry into the centre and roll out as even as you can. Keep turning it and re-dusting it with the icing sugar until it’s roughly the size of the paper then slide it onto the baking tin and sprinkle the remaining icing sugar on top.
Stab with a fork at roughly 2-3cm apart then put it in the fridge for at least 10 minutes. Puff pastry must be baked from cold. Then place another sheet of baking paper loosely over the top of the pastry and put another baking tin on top. Weighing it down slightly is to stop the pastry from rising. Then bake for approximately 20 minutes or until it’s lightly browned.
When you have removed them from the oven allow them to cool for a couple of minutes before you remove the weight. Then take the paper off the top and carefully flip the pastry upside down on a board so that you can take away the bottom paper.
While it’s still warm, with a sharp knife, cut off all the frilly edges (the birds can have them) ….oh no Minnie and Maisie have eaten the frills instead ??
You need to cut 3 pieces for each cream slice so, it doesn’t matter if you have 12 the same sizes what you need is sets of 3 roughly the same size so that they can be stacked. Also they are very sweet so be warned do not make them too big. The ones in my photos, I actually cut in half again.
Place in rows of 3 and put the warm jam on 2 pieces of each row. Then mix together the ingredients for the filling until nice and creamy but fairly stiff and spread it out among all the pieces with jam on.
Now stack up the pieces turning 3 into 1 ending up with the piece without the jam & cream on the top.
Mix the topping ingredients and cover all the tops then put lines of chocolate across the top of each one and gently drag a cocktail stick through the lines to create the feathering. As you can see mine are not that neat haha but I was trying to squeeze the chocolate through a flimsy sandwich bag that popped!
Put in the fridge for at least an hour to firm up before eating ?
