Gateau Saint Honore

 As you may well have read, today is our eldest son, Tom's 17th birthday. I can't believe where that time has gone!
For his cake, he has set me the challenge of making a 3 page recipe - one that I confess I have been putting off as it involves so many tricky parts. Having watched the Bake Off last night and seen the disastrous egg custard tarts, I felt even more nervous at the thought of two types of pastry and creme patissiere!
In preparation, I decided to be super organised, and weighed out many of the ingredients yesterday so that I didn't have to mess about with scales today.  I have also given myself a clear day in order to make this. I have discovered that there is nothing worse than baking under pressure.
As I type, I am about half way through the instructions, and I think that the worst is over - although caramel, and spun sugar could hold hidden terrors!
The first thing to do was make a sweet pastry disc 7 in in diameter. Sweet pastry is usually a bit of a nightmare to work with, but I saw an interesting technique on the Bake off last night and decided to use it - thanks Kimberley! She sandwiched her pastry between two layers of greaseproof paper before rolling. I did this, having already drawn a 7in circle on the underside of the paper - clever, I hear you cry! I then cut round the circle, and transferred the pastry onto the baking tray, and baked it for about 15 mins. Step one done!
Next I had to make a choux pastry ring 7in in diameter and use the rest of the pastry to make little walnut sized balls. The recipe tells you to pipe a ring using a 1cm nozzle. My nozzle was a little bit smaller and so I ended up going around the ring several times to try and build it up. If I were making this again - highly unlikely unless its super delicious, I would use a bigger nozzle for the ring. Also the recipe did not say how many balls to pipe. I ended up with 14, which will be too many to fit onto the top of the ring, so I would have been better to make the ring slightly thicker. Step two completed.
Next job was to make the creme patissiere. This was fairly straight forward and involved heating milk with a vanilla pod. I have never used a vanilla pod before, and was quite excited to go out and buy some. The excitement soon disappeared when I had to pay £2.98 for two pods! I can't even find another recipe in the book to use the remaining pod on!! I didn't even have to scrape the pod out, just leave it in for 10 mins and then throw away! Still, it does smell, and taste nice.
Having mixed the milk with some other ingredients, and heated it to thicken, I am now waiting for it to cool before adding cream to it. So far so good.....
.....Several hours later. Do you remember the hidden terrors that I mentioned? Well they were found in making caramel - see saucepan with encrusted sugar! To cut a very long story short, I discovered through watching u-tube that you don't stir the sugar after it has dissolved, you just leave it to boil. Also instead of taking it off the heat, plunging the pan into cold water then hot, you just remove it from the heat. It was at this stage that I had a problem with my sugar crystalizing, but it probably was not helped by the fact that I had stirred it while it was boiling. If only I had watched u-tube first! As it was,my first lot of caramel was an epic fail, the second lot was better - I managed to make some little caramel discs before it all went solid, but it left me none to stick the choux buns on with. Then I had an idea. In my cupboard I had a tin of  condensed milk caramel. I did not want the cake to be a disaster, so I opened this, and used it to stick the ring onto the pastry, and the buns onto the ring. For good measure I then put a spoon of caramel on the top of each bun, and stuck the caramel disc on top!
I forgot to add that the creme patissiere was rather runny, and I should have thickened it more. I had presumed  that it would thicken up more on cooling. Still, with all the buns in place, I poured the creme into the middle, and thankfully none of it leaked out!
The piece de resistance was the spun sugar, of which I am very proud. I was feeling quite low about my caramel and nearly didn't bother with this, but having watched a couple of u-tube clips I set to work, ignoring the book! I got a bowl and flicked the caramel back and forth over it until I had a good web of sugar. I was then able to pick it up and form it into a ball. I felt really quite professional!! Finally, about 6 hours later, it was finished!
I think Tom and his friends were fairly impressed with the gateau. They were all very polite and had a slice each. The taste verdict on it was 7.75. It was nice but a little sickly. I almost certainly would not make this recipe again, it is just too much effort, however  I do have a sense of achievement, and I have learned some useful lessons today - it's just been a very long day!

Top tip - if you burn sugar onto the bottom of your pan, put some water over it, along with some bicarbonate of soda, and heat. It comes off like a treat. Thanks Google!