Hey, to start this new year, I wish you my best wishes for 2017! Lots of success and joy for this year to come! And barely recovered from the emotions of the holidays, it's now time to celebrate Epiphany cake! To be honest, I'm not a big fan of galette, I'm not a fan of puff pastry and I really hate frangipane (even though I love almonds a lot, who knows!). So this year, I decided to innovate a little and make a chocolate orange galette.

Since the galette is made up of puff pastry and a filling, the first step was to choose the type (classic, quick, semi-quick or inverse) and make it. Normally the top for galettes is to make an inverse puff pastry (which rises better when baking), but I had neither the time nor the courage!

So I opted for quick puff pastry and since Chris from Master Pastry Chef's had been popular, I went for that recipe. In the end it's not that different from classic puff pastry, but not that quick to make either (I think I'll test the mixing with a food processor next time). In terms of taste, it's very good but didn't rise much, but I rolled it out quite thinly. Don't hesitate to be a little more generous than me!

In terms of technique, puff pastry is not the easiest preparation to make but with a little method it's quite accessible. You just need to be a little precise. For equipment, I always recommend a marble slab to keep your dough nice and cool (you can find them at Casa or... at funeral homes, their scraps are apparently inexpensive). In the not essential but practical, I recommend the dough scraper (I gave this one to my mom but any one will do).

First step for well-made puff pastry, properly shape your butter. To do this, you just need to pound it with a rolling pin (it's great for the nerves!) and enclose it in parchment paper. Give your paper a square shape by folding the edges underneath and spread the butter to fill the entire paper (it's a bit complicated to explain but in reality it's very easy, use the parchment as a mold for your butter):

Next, we'll make the dough mixture by mixing the flour and salt. We make a small well and pour in a little water. We gradually incorporate the flour into the water and when all the water is added, we continue mixing by folding the preparation with the dough scraper.

After a while the dough mixture will eventually form a ball.

Normally at this point, the dough mixture and butter should have about the same consistency (otherwise wait for the butter to soften a bit). Then, we spread the dough into a square slightly larger than the butter square and place the latter on top of the dough but diagonally:

We fold the sides together by sealing the edges so that the butter is well enclosed in the dough mixture.

Then we give a few rolling pin strikes to properly incorporate the butter into the dough mixture and roll out the dough lengthwise (the dough obtained should be about 3 times longer than it is wide).

Then we start to make the first "turn" (that is, we fold the dough onto itself to create layers of butter, which will be the flakiness). For classic puff pastry, we make 6 turns. You can make them "simple" (like here by folding the dough in half) or "double" (by folding both sides at the same time then once more onto itself).

ATTENTION, if you are fans of double turns, know that a double turn is worth not 2 but 1.5 turns! So to make 6 turns, you'll need 6 simple turns or 4 double turns (it makes sense!).

And so once our first turn is done, since it's quick pastry, we don't refrigerate (whereas in classic puff pastry, we let the dough cool for 15 minutes in the fridge every 2 turns). So in this recipe, we continue by turning the obtained dough a quarter turn (and so on my marble the dough joint is parallel to the side where my logo is written). We repeat the last two steps 5 times and we get nice puff pastry that we're going to cut up!

We cut the dough into two equal parts and roll out (not too thinly, here, it's too thin!) and reserve the two doughs obtained in the refrigerator.

We've made good progress in the recipe, the hardest part is done! But be careful, if you want a nice regular galette, you'll need to respect the cooling times. Indeed, the great difficulty of puff pastry is that it shrinks as soon as you work with it a little. To avoid that, we cool it so that the gluten (which is responsible for elasticity) can calm down and leave us with dough that's easy to work with. For the same reason, we never cut puff pastry before moving it, because otherwise you're sure that your perfectly cut circles will end up as oval and crooked on the baking sheet. So we always transport dough with extra and cut once on the sheet.

While the two puff pastries are in the refrigerator, we take the opportunity to prepare the filling. We soak the candied oranges in rum and we blanch the sugar and eggs. Meanwhile, we heat the liquid cream with a good tablespoon of unsweetened cocoa and add it to the egg/sugar mixture. We put it back on the heat until it thickens and once the cream is nice and thick, we add the candied oranges and store it in a pastry bag (without the tip) and off to the refrigerator (it's amazing how the fridge has been our friend today!).

Once the cream is well cooled, we can begin our assembly (courage, it's almost done!).

We place a layer of puff pastry and trace a circle using a salad bowl. It's just to make a mark to know where to place our filling, not to cut the dough. Then, we pipe the chocolate cream leaving two centimeters between the mark and the cream.

Then with a brush, we apply a thin layer of water to the perimeter (the space between the cream and the mark, are you still following?). Finally, we add the second dough, we seal the two puff pastries well by pressing at the joint to make them adhere. Finally only then, we take our salad bowl again to cut both doughs at the same time:

And there I promise you your galette will be perfectly round!

Assembly of the chocolate orange galette

Last step, we decorate with the tip of a knife to make nice lines. I would however be quite incapable of recommending designs to you because decoration is not my forte. In any case I recommend making holes well so that air can escape and the galette doesn't puff up too much during baking because of the air! Last step, we brush a thin layer of beaten egg and put it in the oven for 40 minutes.

And tadaaaa, we will have well deserved this chocolate orange galette!

In terms of taste, I have a hard time giving you feedback. I found it good but without orange flavor. My colleagues who don't like orange couldn't eat it but others found that the rum was too present and still others loved it.

So if you like the chocolate/orange combination, I recommend making it and forming your own opinion 😉

Chocolate orange galette