No. 3295

Cream Cakes with Burnt Almonds and Glazed Cream Cakes

Choux Pralines et Choux Glaces

Lay on a baking sheet about twelve small cream cakes (No. 3296); egg over and lay on each a small pinch of shredded or chopped almonds, and cover these with a pinch of powdered sugar; cook the cakes in a slack oven and when they become cold open and fill them either with apricot marmalade (No. 3675), currant (No. 3670), quince (No. 3672) or apple jelly (No. 3668), or else with Chantilly cream (No. 50) or St. Honore cream (No. 49).

To Giaze the Cream Cakes take them up one by one and dip the upper parts into sugar cooked to "crack" (No. 171), then lay them at once on a wire grate to drain off the surplus sugar. These can also be filled with pastry cream (No. 46) flavored with vanilla, orange or orange flower water.

← No. 3294 Cream Cakes Iced with Chocolate, Vanilla or Small Cakes for Entremets No. 3296 Cream Cakes with Whipped Cream or St. Honore →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a finishing recipe rather than a full one: Ranhofer assumes you have already piped and have on hand the choux puffs of No. 3296, and he sends you off to numbered fillings and a sugar boiled to the crack stage. The two techniques worth getting right are the bake and the caramel dip.

What a "cream cake" is hereNot a cake but a small choux puff, made from pâte à choux; the recipe calls for about twelve of them.
"Slack oven" needs interpretingA slack oven is usually glossed as somewhere in the region of 250-325F, which will not raise choux. Puffs need a hot start, around 400-425F, to generate steam, then a drop to about 350F to set and dry. Ranhofer may have had in mind a masonry oven falling from a bread bake, with the paste meeting a higher heat at the moment it went in.
Almonds and sugar on topThe egg wash is the glue. Shredded almonds and a pinch of powdered sugar go on before baking, and the sugar caramelizes lightly on the surface. Watch them near the end, since nuts and sugar scorch well before the puff is dry inside.
Dry them out, then cool completelyUnderbaked choux collapse as they cool and turn leathery. When they are deep gold, pierce the base or crack the oven door and leave them to dry ten minutes. Fill only when cold, or the cream weeps.
Sugar cooked to "crack"Ranhofer's No. 171 is the crack stage, roughly 290-310F on a thermometer. Dip only the crowns, then set them on a rack to shed the excess. The glaze can go tacky in a humid kitchen, so glaze close to serving.
The fillings, translatedChantilly is sweetened whipped cream; St. Honoré cream is pastry cream lightened with beaten whites; No. 46 is plain pastry cream. Apricot "marmalade" here means a thick reduced fruit paste, not a citrus preserve.
Praliné in this senseIn this entry praliné means almond-crusted, not the caramelized nut paste sold under the name today. Do not substitute praline paste.

A Little History

Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years running the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and the book is organized as a professional reference, which is why this entry is little more than a set of cross-references to numbered base preparations elsewhere in the volume. Choux paste itself is generally traced to sixteenth-century Italian cooks in France, with the name pâte à choux coming from the cabbage-like shape of the baked puff; by Ranhofer's day it was foundation work, and a New York pastry section would have turned out trays of these small puffs to be glazed, iced, or stacked into a gâteau St-Honoré as the service required. The placement under "Small Cakes for Entremets" reflects the older sense of entremets as the sweet course sent up near the end of a long menu, in variety rather than as a single plated dessert.