Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Fancy Pastries

Posted November 01, 2010
Find more about Kids , pastry , dessert
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Fancy!

See that cut-off edge? That's all you need!

Birdy using a "tiny glass" to cut circles.

The fluted pastry wheel is a lovely utensil.

Birdy's friend uses a fork to crimp the edges of her chocolate-grape pie.

So many pastries, so little, um, dough.

The washing of the egg. No. Eggwashing.

The sprinkling of the sprinkles. "This is the funnest part!"

Oh, blue food, you are so delicious and natural. Did you ever make copper sulphate crystals in chemistry class? Exactly.

Can you see this at all? Not to get all Ansel Adams on you, but I could not resist taking a picture of the melted sugar colors.

I don't care how many mini bags of Whoppers you ate in the night. I don't want to know about the Sour Patch Kids that are now lodged in your dental situation. You've got to shake off that Mama-I'm-sure-you-didn't-but-did-you-maybe-by-accident-eat-some-of-my-Halloween-candy glycemic stupor and get ready for... Pie Crust: The Sequel! You made the apple pie, right? And now you've got leftover pastry in your fridge? Perfect! It's time to flour your countertop, give your kids a rolling pin, and dig out all the colorful cupcakey things you've got lurking in the back of the cabinet. Fancy Pastries loom on your horizon like a panful of awesome! Colorful, creative, sugar-dusted, and slightly burnt awesome!

This, for me, is the cooking equivalent of Play-doh: the kids will be busy with it for hours, it's creative and inexpensive, you can eat a little as you go and even if you get a stomach ache nobody needs to call poison control, and it's an activity that can be quite radically under-supervised without any significant consequences save a dusting of flour over some or all of your kitchen.

Actually, watching the kids smoosh and roll and cut and decorate for such a happy afternoon really gave me a kind of flashback to the time before they went to school. Play-doh was my ace in the hole, activity-wise: the same way friends of ours used to unplug their computer keyboard and plop it into the playpen when they wanted to have sex (they'd be done just about the time their toddler was tiring of pushing all the letters), I used to save the Play-doh experience for the kind of afternoon when I was so tired that I needed to lie down on the kitchen floor, dozing on Play-doh fumes and hoping that the moment would last forever because really, I was never going to be able, Phoenix-like, to rise up out of the ashes of my fully perished self. Sometimes I even made the Play-doh from scratch, because the warmth and freshness would buy me another 5 or 6 minutes of floor-lying bliss. (People like to be all, "Oh, excuse me, Play-doh-making mother-of-the-universe!" when you make it yourself, but really, it's not like you gave your husband a DIY vasectomy. It's salt dough.)

Anyway, I cannot enough recommend that you give your kids some pastry and some time and some colored sugar. My own mum did it for me, and look how I turned out! (Er. . . )

Fancy Pastries
Yield varies
Total time: 5 minutes-3 hours

Ingredients:
Leftover dough and leftover egg wash from this recipe.

Or, if you want to start from scratch, make this--it's the dough I use for my galettes, and it's delicious. More on this dough soon. . .

1 1/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 stick cold butter, diced into dice-sized, er, dice
1/4 cup sour cream whisked with 1/4 cup cold water

Food processor method: Combine the flour and salt in the bowl of your food processor, then distribute the butter over it. Pulse for a second or two at a time, 5 or 6 times, and then check to see what it looks like: you want should see a mix of crumbs and pea-size lumps of butter. Drizzle the sour-cream mixture in through the feed tube, then pulse again until the mixture just starts to come together in large clumps. Gather the dough into a ball and proceed.

To set up the pastry station:

  • Turn the oven to 400 and line a large cookie sheet with parchment.
  • Put out a rolling pin, a cup with extra flour for sprinkling, and cutting devices such as pastry wheels (hello, stocking stuffer!), pizza cutter, and cookie cutters (or small glasses for making circles).
  • Flour your counter and divide the dough into the number of kids you've got.
  • Put out a small glass of water for gluing the dough to itself.
  • Beat an egg and put out small, clean paint brushes for brushing it on with.
  • Put out small bowls filled with chocolate chips, dried cherries or cranberries (soak these in water first so they won't burn), and jelly or jam with a couple of spoons
  • Put out shakers of plain or colored sugar or sprinkles

Now let your go to town, rolling the dough out thin (show them to sprinkle the counter and the dough with flour so it won't stick) and cutting and decorating it. Favorite methods in our house include covering a piece of dough with jam and chocolate chips, rolling it up jelly-roll-style, and cutting it into slices, and also sandwiching stuff inside two circles and using a fork to crimp the edges, like making a round pasty (or folding one circle over on itself to make a half-moon). Whenever an edge meets an edge, show the kids how to rub a wet finger over the edge first to stick it. Ideally, the dough will be thinnish, and the jam won't come into major contact with the pan, where it will likely burn. But you know what? It doesn't really matter that much. The kids are going to love these because they made them.

When all the dough is used up, show the kids how to brush egg wash on their pastries before sprinkling them with whatever they like.

When everything is done, bake them until they are somewhere between golden and pale brown; I start checking at around 10 minutes. Again, some things might get a little darker than others, but it doesn't really matter. Cool on a rack before eating (the jam will be really, really hot for a while.)

*Tip: I give each child a designated part of the cookie sheet so there's no confusion about whose is which.

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Fancy Pastries

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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