Mme. Pépin: Pre-prep for Cannelés

Tomorrow is Halloween. My un-domestic friend and myself have opted to have a quiet night in as opposed to the ever-so-popular-amongst-our-age-group boozy night on the town. I've obtained some of my childhood favorite scary-ish movies (several of the Charlie Chan flicks and Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein), which we will watch tomorrow night. While we were planning our evening in, my friend was looking at Jacque's cookbook (she hadn't looked at it yet). Having a major sweet tooth she went straight for the dessert section and settled on the page featuring the Cannelés. We decided that would nicely round out our evening festivities.

Cannelés, according the Jacques, feature crêpe batter and sugar cooked in a special pan. While the outside hardens, the inside stays creamy. They are a very French dessert.

The recipe needs to be started a day in advance, so tonight we plan to make the first part of the recipe.

Cannelés require a special pan of sorts, appropriately called a Cannelé Pan. Obviously, the gourmet chef that I'm not, I do not have one of these sitting around my apartment, nor does my friend. Now, unlike the cheesy potatoes, I'm not going to just improvise with my tools, lesson learned. We will not need the pan for this evenings portion of the recipe, so we will head out tomorrow in search of it.

To aid in our search I did a little pre-research into where we might find cette pan. Sur la Table appears to have something, and William Sonoma said they had something when they appeared on Google, but I have yet to find it on their site. I suppose tomorrow will be an adventure as we locate the final piece to our recipe.

More to come.

Part 2.

My friend and I met up after my office's Halloween party. The ingredients for the Cannelés were pretty simple, and aside from the Milk I had all of them. Though once we got started we realized that Dark Rum was needed, somehow I missed that one. Thankfully, I had an unopened bottle of Amaretto from well over a year ago when I moved into my apartment, and we decided that that would be an appropriate substitute.

The assembly was pretty simple. Melted the butter in the milk. Added an egg and an egg yolk. Added the Amaretto, flour and sugar. Mixed it together bit by bit so as to avoid lumps. And put it into the refrigerator to thicken overnight.

More tomorrow.