when the heat is on...

oh... boy, yesterday was quite a doozie of a day. It was again over 30C. What do you do when the weather is that hot? Heh, well, you bake of course! :-D. I know, I know... but when it's that hot, your brain doesn't function properly and well, you understand, it is a dry heat. ;-)

Anways. I made something called wienerbrod which probably started off as a recipe to wrap around little wieners, but now it was posted on the net as a puff pastry dessert type of deal. You start by making a dough, and then smashing as much butter as you can get your hands on between layers of it. It's crazy the amount of butter that goes into this! It's not only crazy, it's almost scary!... I swear you are literally putting slabs of hard, cold fat and then folding it over and over into what turns out to be a very flaky dough, which in french we call "mille feuilles" (a thousand leaves or pages).

The recipe calls for 1 egg, that you separate and add the yolk to the dough part and reserve the white for a glaze. My recipe however changes that to 3 eggs, as after putting the yolk in the dough, you must absolutely knock over your container with the egg white and let it drip all over you counter. Then you must crack open another egg... separate that and then step back and think...hmmm.... what would it take for me to actually wipe down these cabinets... well, heck, I think if I dripped something on them, that would give me enough incentive... so then you put your second egg white in a small saucer and set it on the rounded edge of your counter so it will dutifully slide off and all along the the surface of your cabinet door beneath... of course, you just need a bit of glaze so you'd think there would be enough left in the saucer... but no!... the gooey whites band together and slip and slide as one. So that's why my recipe takes 3.

When you finally are ready to put them in the oven, you do brush on your white egg-wash and then because what looks like 14kgs of butter is just not calorie intensive enough, you sprinkle on a bunch of pearl sugar. Pearl sugar tastes like regular sugar but is in balls that look like little styrofoam beads, exactly like those found in bean bags. Sprinkled on pastries, it makes them sweet but also gives them a very nice crunchy texture.

Here is what they turn out to look like: