Name: Millefeuille
Prep time: 1 h 12 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 1 h 42 min
Yield: 5 people
Cuisine: french
Ingredients: 300 g Confectioner's custard (Crème pâtissière, or French pastry cream); 150 g Chantilly cream; 300 g Puff or flaky pastry (pâte feuilletée); 4 tablespoons icing sugar; a little chocolate

Preparation

Resting

Cooking

Start to finish

57 min.

15 min.

30 min.

1 hour 42 min.

Step by step recipe

Stage 1

20 min.

The day before, or several hours before, make crème pâtissière (confectioner's custard).

Roll out puff pastry as thinly as possible. Then put on a baking sheet in the fridge for about one hour, so that if it needs to shrink, it happens in the fridge instead of the oven.

It is very difficult to make a regular rectangle (see photo) but don't worry about that.

Preheat oven to 410°F (210°C).

Stage 2

30 min.

Put a sheet of cooking parchment onto pastry and place a cooling rack on top. We do that to stop puff pastry swelling too much during cooking, essential for millefeuilles.

Put in the oven for about 30 minutes, but remove paper and rack after 20 minutes to allow pastry to brown.

Stage 3

15 min.

When pastry is cooked, remove from the oven, allow to cool a little and put on a rack to finish cooling.

Stage 4

5 min.

With a bread knife or steak knife, trim the edges of puff pastry to get a regular rectangle (you can use a ruler to help with this).

Stage 5

3 min.

Cut the rectangle into three. (use the first piece as a template to cut the others to the same size)

Look at the three parts to determinate the best looking, that means flat, regular and brown. This will be the top of your millefeuille.

Stage 6

1 min.

Make 150 g Chantilly cream and fold it gently into crème pâtissière, with a maryse by turning with the bowl tipped at an angle.

Stage 7

You will get a delicious vanilla cream, light and perfumed.

Stage 8

3 min.

On the serving plate (quite impossible to move a millefeuille when finished without catastrophe), put the least pretty piece of pastry.

Stage 9

5 min.

With a forcing bag full of cream, pipe small balls or rosettes of cream...

Stage 10

... over the whole surface.

Stage 11

2 min.

Then gently add the second piece of puff pastry.

Stage 12

5 min.

Cover with more piped balls of cream.

Stage 13

10 min.

Mix 1 tablespoon water with 4 tablespoons icing sugar to make a glacé icing, and spread over top of last (and best) piece of puff pastry.

You can also add trails of melted chocolate, but it's not easy to do well.

If you want to be sure of quick success, just sprinkle top with icing sugar.

Stage 14

3 min.

And finally, place the last puff pastry piece on top.

Your millefeuille is ready to serve.

Remarks

Millefeuilles can be made in an infinite variety of shapes and flavours, but keeping to this basic principle: 2 layers of something soft between 3 layers of something crispy. Just by keeping puff pastry and replacing vanilla cream with a layer of raspberries or strawberries and a lime cream, it's extraordinary.

Be careful!: You can put your millefeuille in the fridge to wait, but not too long: 4-5 hours maximum, never more, never overnight! Because eventually the cream will soak into the pastry, and you will get that horrible limp thing that bad bakers try to pass off as millefeuille.

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