Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Puff-Paste Cakes
Puff-Paste Cakes
Prepare one pound of puff-paste of six turns, put it in a cold place for a few minutes, then roll it out to one-fourth inch in thickness. Cut it with a sharp knife into pieces of a rectangular shape about four inches long and two inches broad, which cut again into halves across from one corner to the other; mark with the point of a knife in lines converging to the square corner so as to resemble a fan. Butter a baking-tin, lay the pieces of paste on their sides on it leaving a small space between them, and bake in a very quick oven. Arrange them on a hot dish, dust over with sugar, and serve.
A garnish pastry rather than a dessert in its own right — thin triangles of puff paste scored into fans, baked hard and fast, and sent out hot alongside creams, ices and compotes. Almost everything depends on the dough being cold when it hits the heat.
- "Six turns"Puff paste is laminated by repeated folding; six turns is the classic full count, giving several hundred layers. A pound of good all-butter frozen puff pastry, given one extra fold if you like, stands in perfectly well.
- Keep it cold"A few minutes" in a cold place is optimistic for a modern kitchen. Chill the block until firm, roll quickly, and chill the cut shapes again for 15–20 minutes before baking, or the butter softens and the layers weld shut.
- "A very quick oven"Period usage puts this at roughly 450-475F, though the book gives no temperatures and such terms were never exact. Puff paste needs the initial blast to turn its water to steam and drive the layers apart; a moderate oven leaves you with greasy biscuit. At that heat these thin pieces should take somewhere around 8-12 minutes.
- CuttingRectangles four by two inches cut corner to corner give long right triangles. The scored lines fan out from the square corner — score only through the top few layers, or the pastry splits apart as it rises.
- "On their sides"An ambiguous phrase in the original. In practice the pieces are laid flat on the tin, well spaced; "on their sides" appears to mean cut-side down so the scored face is uppermost.
- The tinA buttered tin was standard, but butter encourages the bases to darken before the tops set. Parchment on a heavy sheet, lightly dampened underneath if you like, is a better surface.
- The sugarDusting after baking, as the recipe directs, gives a plain finish. Dusting lightly with caster sugar for the last two or three minutes instead lets it melt to a thin glaze.
- YieldA pound of paste rolled a quarter-inch thick makes somewhere between two and three dozen fans, depending on trim. They stale fast; bake the day they are wanted.
Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896, catalogues the working repertoire of a large hotel kitchen. The fan shape is one of a family of decorative puff-paste cuts alongside palm leaves, crescents and ovals. Puff paste is generally associated with French patisserie and reached American hotel kitchens through the French-trained chefs who staffed them; laminated dough was expensive in butter and labour.