Binging with Babish - Courtesan au Chocolat from Grand Budapest Hotel

The Grand Budapest Hotel: A Pastry Tutorial

This week, I am extolling the virtues of yet another DVD special feature that showcases exactly how to make car design for The Grand Budapest Hotel. However, as it turns out, this tutorial is actually about making pastry. Specifically, we're going to make some choux pastry, which is even fussier than its own name suggests. We'll start by melting together a stick of butter and a cup of water, bringing it to a fair simmer on the stovetop before taking it off the heat and adding a cup of sifted flour mixed together with a wooden spoon.

We return to medium-low heat and mix constantly until the dough forms a single mass. Then, we remove from the heat and allow to cool just enough so that it won't cook when we add the beaten eggs later on. We'll slowly whisk in four beaten eggs while mixing until a sticky pipeable paste forms. And indeed, we are going to pipe this into one and a half inch, one inch, and 1/2 inch sized olives – because that's exactly what we're going to do.

As I'm struggling to create these puffed pastry shapes, I wanted to show you guys something I got my first advance copy of my book II. This is a book that contains this very recipe, among other things. You can see it for yourself in the accompanying photo – it also has some resplendent photography and block typefaces. And, as an added bonus, it features fan favorite recipes like pasta or Leo's famous spaghetti dish. Pre-order your copy now; it comes out on October 3rd.

Now that our choux pastry puffs have come out of the oven, we're going to immediately poke some holes in them using a paring knife. This will help steam escape, resulting in a lighter, more ethereal pastry. As those cool completely, we'll make our fillings and frostings. Let's start with our chocolate creme patissière. In a medium bowl, we combine 1/4 cup of sugar, tablespoon of all-purpose flour, and 1 1/2 teaspoons of cornstarch. We then add three large egg yolks – just saying, I'm making you worry that the creme fat is going to be too loose or too thin, so we need to make sure not to mess this up.

We get two cups of whole milk steaming, not boiling but just warm enough to melt 8 ounces of really, really good chocolate. Make sure you use very high-quality chocolate, because it's the most important part of this recipe. Once the chocolate is all steaming hot and melted, we add it bit by bit to our egg and sugar mixture while whisking constantly to temper the eggs. Now that the eggs have been tempered, we can add the rest of the chocolate mixture back to our saucepan and cook over medium-low heat until the mixture is too thick and custardy and can coat the back spoon.

The creme patissière then has to cool completely before we can pipe it into our choux pastry. We pour it into a bowl and cover with a layer of plastic wrap, pressing the plastic down under the surface of the chocolate refrigerate for at least two hours. Now that the crème au chocolat has cooled, we're ready to move on to our frostings.

First up is the glaze – we'll start by whisking together a cup of confectioner's sugar slowly with whole milk until a pourable frosting forms. We can then color this glaze pink, green, and purple because, just like an actual Wes Anderson movie, this entire thing needs to be covered in muted pastels.

For our structural frosting, we combine four tablespoons of melted butter, 2 cups of confectioner's sugar, and just a hint of whole milk creating a thick, sturdy frosting that we'll use to color a pale blue. We start by glazing the choux pastry, once the glaze has hardened, we pipe it full of creme patissière, filling each one with different colors – Federal's the largest puff is purple, the second-largest is green, and the littlest one is pink.

We then decorate our profiteroles with a filigree of melted white chocolate – something that I'm not very good at creating. Finally, we frost the top of each profiterole with blue structural frosting and stack them one on top of the other until they precariously form a decorative Tower on top of which we place a single Coke. And, because we want to try and fail to get a cross-section of this twee little mountain of indulgence, we immediately go ahead and eat it – for us, that's all there is to this sweet, fussy pastry adventure.