The Swan Thieves and Swan Cream Puffs

Happy New Year!  If you are looking for resolution recipes for those no fat Kale Chips or some sort of detox smoothie, you have come to the wrong place!  Bookcooker is starting off 2011 with decadence - swan cream puffs with vanilla pastry cream on a chocolate pond!  I was so excited when Elizabeth Kostova's the Swan Thieves came out, since I thoroughly enjoyed her first book, The Historian.  The Swan Thieves was a little less thrilling and mysterious, but enjoyable, especially towards the end of the book.  The book revolves around a fictional nineteenth century French painting depicting  Leda and the Swan from Greek mythology.  In that myth, Zeus takes an interest in Leda, the beautiful daughter of a Greek king.  Zeus takes the form a swan and seduces Leda.  On the same night, Leda sleeps with her husband.  She bears children, Helen (of Troy) and Clytemnestra and Castor and Pollux, who are half human and half immortal.  Leda and the Swan is a popular theme for artists over the centuries.  The Swan Thieves is at its heart about the obsession that comes with being a great artist (also the theme of the film the Black Swan, which I saw this past week).  I learned how to make cream puffs and eclairs in a baking class, but this is the first time I tried the classic swan form of cream puff.   They are a bit old fashioned and fussy, but fun, yummy and easy!

Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves is about an artist, Robert Oliver, and his obsession with painting and the past.  The novel starts when Oliver is arrested for attempting to attack a painting  - Leda and the Swan - in the National Gallery.  The painting is by a lesser known French artist working during the Impressionist era.  After his arrest, Oliver agrees to be voluntarily commited to a mental hospital, and it is hear that we meet the main narrator of the book, Dr. Andrew Marlow.  Dr. Marlow is Oliver's pyschiatrist, and also a hobby painter and single, lonely man.  Dr. Marlow narrates much of the book as his patient, Robert Oliver, immediately takes a vow of silence once he is committed. Therefore, it is up to Dr. Marlow to piece together from talking to those that know Oliver why he tried to stab the painting and what exactly is going in his head.  Marlow toes and often crosses ethical lines in his efforts, and it is clear that what drives him is not necessarily a desire to heal Robert Oliver, but the satisfaction of solving a difficult mystery.  Marlow first learns about Oliver from his ex-wife, Kate.  Kostova has Kate take over the narration of several chapters, and through Kate we learn a lot about Robert Oliver and his obsessive character.  Through Marlow's meetings with Kate, at Oliver's former home, we learn about the central subject of Oliver's painting and the big mystery - a beautiful dark haired woman, seemingly from the ninetheenth century based on her clothes.  Oliver paints or draws her over and over and over in various poses, all seemingly from a live model they are so vivid and real. At some point, Kostova throws into the narrative some letters between a nineteenth century woman in living in France, a painter, and her husbands uncle.  Marlow found these letters in Oliver's possession and are clearly a large part of Oliver's obsession.  We also meet Mary, Oliver's former student and lover, and through her narration we learn about Oliver after his marriage to Kate ended and leading up to his attack at the Musuem. The story of the French woman, Beatrice de Cleaval, at this point switches from letters to straight third person narration.  The novel is a bit slow at first but towards the end picks up a real intensity as we come closer to finding out what drives Oliver and his connection of Beatrice.  Which in the end the reader discovers, but to be honest I found it all a bit too vanilla. I was expecting /(and hoping for) some really dark awful secret or mystical connection between past and present, but really it was just about mild mental illness, artistic obsession, and inappropriate relationships.  I certainly enjoyed the book, but I found the narration and central role of Marlow to detract from my enjoyment.  Marlow is a bit of a simp and quiet blah. And in the end, I don't think I really understood what drove Oliver to paint Beatrice is the manner in which he did, and for that reason found the book somewhat unsatisfying.

Cream Puff Swans (Cream Puffs with Vanilla Pastry Cream and Chocolate Ganache)
Adapted from Joanne Chang's Flour Cookbook recipe for Eclairs
(Note:  As a Bostonian I LOVE Flour Bakery and was so happy when this cookbook came out.  This is the second recipe I made from the book and sadly also the second time I had problems with a recipe from the book.  During thanksgiving, my Flour pie crust was a shrunken mess (but the pumpkin pie filling was to die for).  Here, the pastry cream was way thicker than it should have been, I rescued it with more cream (which along with more butter, solves any cooking disaester, right?)  Go ahead and try this pastry cream or use a recipe you know is great (I have made Martha Stewart's from her Baking Handbook and it turned out well, just lighten in up by folding in some whipped cream).  OR, just skip the pastry cream and fill the choux puffs with Vanilla ice cream.
Ingredients
Choux
1 stick butter
1 cup water
1 tablespoon sugar
pinch salt
1 cup flour
4 eggs 
Pastry Cream
1 cup milk
1/2 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cake flour
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup cream

Ganache
4 oz semisweet chocolate (chopped or chips)
1/2 cup heavy cream

For the Choux Pastry:  Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Melt butter, water, sugar and salt in heavy saucepan over medium heat.  Do not let the butter come to a boil! Add the flour, and stir vigourously to combine. 

Continue to stir vigorourly over medium heat for 3 - 4 minutes until the choux paste comes off the side of the pan and there is a think film on the bottom of the pan.  I never got the film, but cookied for about 5 minutes, and the choux came out great.

Transfer the choux to a mixer fitted with a paddle attachment.  Mix on medium low spead for about 1 minute, to cool the choux down.  Meanwhile, crack the four eggs into a bowl or container and whisk to break up the eggs.  Add to the choux mixture, with the mixer running on medium, a little bit at a time, making sure all the egg is incorporated.  Beat for about 2 minutes until the choux is smooth and glossly like below.  You need to use the choux as soon as you are finished mixing it, so plan accordingly.

Now prepare a pastry bag with a medium to small round tip.  Add about a cup of the choux past and pipe (onto baking sheets with parchment) 9 "s" shapes.  You could also after you have done this pinch the top of the "s" so it forms a little beek.  I forgot to do this.  Then, on another parchment lined baking sheet, use a pastry bag without a tip to form 9 ovals.

Bake the swan heads and puffs in the 400 degree oven for about 15 minutes, when they start to turn golden brown.  Then drop the oven temp down to 325 and bake for about 12-15 minutes more for the swan heads, depending on how thick they are - keep a close watch on these. (Note, I would drop your oven temp down at the 12 minute mark, since some ovens can be slow to drop temperature).  And for about 30 minutes more the puffs.  Till golden brown and puffy.

To make the pastry cream (the order of this post is off, you should make the pastry cream first since it requires a bit of chilling... In a medium bowl, mix together the sugar and cake flour till well combined.  Meanwhile (no picture hear, sorry), scald the milk in a heavy saucepan.  To scald it means to heat it until just before it boils.  This should be done on medium heat, and when there are little bubbles around the edge of the pan, you are where you want to be (and the milk is scalded).  Meanwhile, beat together the egg and egg yolk.  Then add the flour mixture and beat well (it will be very thick.)  Then add the scalded milk, a small amount at a time, and whisk together.  Add this back to the saucepan and cook, whisking constantly, over medium low heat until it thickens.  This is where I ran into trouble.  Chang says this should take 3 or 4 minutes, but my pastry cream thickened up VERY quickly, I cooked it for long enough so that I thought the flour taste would be cooked out, but it was gel like rather than silky.  I stirred in the vanilla and put in the fridge.  Chang recommends for at least 4 hours.

After the chilling time, I whipped 1/2 cup of whipped cream, and if your pastry cream came out nice and silky, at this point you fold that into the pastry cream.  Since mine was gel like, I decided I needed to beat it into submission, so I added it to the kitchen aid (with whisk attachment) and beat the hell out of it till it was smoother and silkier, adding about another 2 tablepsoons of cream along the way.  This is what it looked like.  Good enough to stuff a cream puff and D-lish.

For Ganache:  Put the chocolate in a heat proof bowl.  Scald the cream, pour over the chocolate and whisk until chocolate melted and ganache smooth.

To assemble the swans:  Cut about a third off the top of each cream puff.  Cut the top part in two to form the wings of the swan.

Pipe or blob some pastry cream in the bottom half of the cream puff, place the wings on the side, and stick the "s" swan neck into the cream.  I placed this on a pool of ganache, and used a bit of ganache to make the eye.

Et Viola!