Canele French pastry
I have never seen or heard of Canele. Italian cannelotti, yes. According to wikipedia, a canelé is a small French pastry with a soft and tender custard center and a dark, thick caramelized crust.
More description of this pastry can be found in Paula-Wolfert.com:
The canelé de Bordeaux (a.k.a cannelé bordelais) is a magical bakery confection, a cake with a rich custardy interior enclosed by a thin caramelized shell. It’s a brilliant construction developed long ago by an anonymous Bordeaux cook, whose innovation has been subjected to 300 years of refinements.
Nearly black at first sight, bittersweet at first bite, the crunchy burnt sugar canelé-shell makes an exquisite complement to its smooth, sweet filling, fragrant with vanilla and rum.
Small enough to eat out of hand, these little cakes have recently gained cachet after years of neglect to the extent that they may one day rival the popularity of crème brûlée in the category of caramelized French sweets.
Many recipes don’t carry a tale; the canelé carries many. One of the oldest refers to a convent in Bordeaux, where, before the French Revolution, the nuns prepared cakes called canalize made with donated egg yolks from local winemakers, who used only the whites to clarify their wines. Any records that might verify this were lost in the turbulent revolution, thus relegating the convent story to legend.
But the alternative tale may be even better: residents of Bordeaux, who lived along the docks, gleaned spilled low-protein flour from the loading areas, then used it to make sweets for poor children. The small canelé molds, fluted and made of copper or brass,nestled in embers to be baked.
Soon, the little cakes, described by a local culinary historian as shaped like “a Doric column without a base,” began cropping up in all sizes and flavorings throughout France. In 1985, stunned by this surge in popularity, 88 Bordeaux patissiers formed a confrérie, or brotherhood, to protect the integrity of their canelés. They staged a “linguistic coup d’etat” by removing one of the n’s from the old spelling (cannelé) to differentiate their cake, with its secret method of preparation, from bastardized versions. Today, canelé de Bordeaux is the official cake of the city, while cannelé bordelais is a generic name used in Paris, New York City, Osaka, Los Angeles, etc.
“Our canelé de Bordeaux had to be protected and promoted as our own,” says Daniel Antoine, a jolly, stocky patissier who operates patisserie Antoine in Bordeaux. “Recently, chocolate and orange cannelés have appeared,” he tells me. “We don’t want them confused with the real thing.”
The official recipe, he told me, has been written down and locked in his vault. All 88 patissiers have sworn to protect its secrets. This much is known: the general recipe calls for a cold batter to be poured into an ice-cold fluted, tin-lined copper mold, then placed in a very hot oven and baked for a very long time. After baking, the canelés are firmly tapped out onto a grill while still hot, then left to cool while their exteriors harden. They’re at their most glorious one hour out of the oven; within five or six hours they begin to turn spongy. patissiers have all sorts of tricks to revive them, ranging from putting them back in a hot oven for a few minutes, to flaming them with quality rum to crisp the shells. I believe they’re so delicious that they’re worth the expense of buying the special copper molds. (See below in recipe notes.) Silicone-coated Gastroflex molds are also available although I don’t think they produce as good a result. On the other hand, the Cannele Silicon Flex 2.2″ x 1.9″Ý mold available at Bridge’s Kitchenware.com is a decent substitute for the copper molds. I brush the insides with a thin coating of “white oil” before using.
“The canelé is an artisanal product, so sometimes it doesn’t come out perfectly,” Antoine says. When I tell him that my canelés sometimes have pale yellow spots on their tops, he replies, “Oh, sure, I know that problem well. It’s due to the puddling of oil in the crevices of the molds. When they come out that way, we say they have ‘a white ass’!”
Well, I bought these for THB100 (AUD3.00) at the Farmers Market, K Village, Sukhumvit 26 (the last weekend of each month) at a stall manned by RINB restaurant, which stands for Restaurant In Box. I have not been to this restaurant. It is situated at Ekkamai Soi 2 and according to their pamphlet they handed out at the stall, it is a French Restaurant with innovative cuisine with eclairs. I will have to find time to try them out.
chingsmiley 