 |
| Pate a choux swan with pastry cream and whipped cream |
I never know when an idea out of left field will bounce home. Quite often I have trouble fielding it when it does.
I didn't plan on making a swan for our friends Jay and Becky Dickman, Denver-based but in town to visit family. Jay is a longtime professional photographer, Nat Geo shooter and Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of the war in El Salvador. You don't just drop a pastry cream swan on a guy like that.
It's silly, gooey and childish, but I felt like I wanted this fowl thing. I know Jay is a Teuscher chocolates man and figured I had him covered with handmade truffles, so why not play with choux paste, too?
It was my first attempt. I served it anyway.
To my surprise, Jay hoisted a camera and took a snap (not the one here by Write House shooter John H. Ostdick). In that delicious moment, he flipped the tables on me and gave me the treat, not the other way around. It made me smile. My heart was glad.
Now that I look at this swan, I see something else. This could be the body of a peacock that needs only a piped gaufrette tail to be magnificent, a few embellishments here and there, macaron wings or something, I'm not sure.
Ideas roll in when you least expect them and usually when you're desperate to focus on the more immediate, like how to fix a broken white chocolate ganache in front of a classroom of paying customers. Why do ideas elude us when we want them most, or more to the point, why do they turn us into makers of silly swans?
Oh, but when those ideas do come, how sweet the taste, how lucky I feel when the Jays of the world capture the moment.
It's picture perfect.
No comments:
Post a Comment