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Friday, April 1, 2011

Cannelés

I think I really started cooking more this year because it has been a year since I left France and I realized I was missing the food. Last year I was still in the excitement of being in Boston for the first time, being at school and taking time to cook was the least of my worries. Now that I have settled down and found my routine, I need to spend time cooking, not only because it allows me to eat food that brings back memories from my years in France, but also because, well, I just love it. Cooking relaxes me.

I have been asked to do more French cooking, and it has been a good challenge for myself, because when I was home with my parents, they were cooking all the traditional dinner dishes and I was more the baker. So now I get to cook a lot of traditional French dishes for the first time. This recipe for cannelés combines my passion for baking and this first time experience of French baking. My mum makes cannelés quite often and they're so good I've never attempted to bake them myself. And it seemed like a lot of work. But when I saw this recipe for cannelés on one of my favorite food blogs, I knew I had to try them.

For those of you who don't know cannelés, they are a specialty of my hometown, Bordeaux. They are delicious pastries that we usually eat as a snack or for dessert with a crème anglaise. The batter is almost like the one you use for crêpes. They can now be baked in silicone molds which are much cheaper than the traditional metal ones. You can find them easily on Amazon. The key to a good cannelé is to have a brown, crunchy outside, and a very soft inside.

Unfortunately, although the recipe I used gave a very good taste to the cannelés, in the end they were not brown and crunchy enough. After asking my mum (expert es cannelés), I think it is because the recipe calls for baking at 180°C for 60 minutes, when cannelés are usually baked at a very high temperature like 220°C for 10 minutes and then you turn the temperature down for 30min. I will definitely try another time, and even though they wee not perfect, these cannelés were still delicious and reminded me of Bordeaux. 
You can see the recipe on kokken69's blog . She also tells you about the story around cannelés that even I didn't know :) !