posted by Angel 04-18-100 1:38 AM
Napoleon
Flaky dough made of 3 cups of flour
Icing Cream:
2 qts. homogenized milk (sorry, no low fat substitution)
6 eggs, separated
2 cups sugar
2 tbs. flour
Vanilla sugar or vanilla extract
2 tbs. butter
Prepare the dough a night before and refrigerate.
Start with the icing: In a large bowl, beat egg yolks with all the sugar on medium speed until almost white. Add flour and vanilla; mix well and set aside.
Over low heat, bring the milk to a boil stirring as needed. Mix about two cups of scalding milk into whatever is left of your egg yolk-sugar mixture to thin it down, and slowly pour it into the rest of the milk stirring constantly.
Bring heat up to medium-low and keep stirring the cream until it thickens up and starts "puffing". Remove from heat, add butter and let cool. It must be a little thicker than pancake dough.
Meanwhile, cut your dough into 12 equal pieces. Roll out every piece as thin as possible, about 2 mm, and cut out a circle. Transfer the leaf onto greased jelly roll pan using your rolling pin and bake at 350 degrees F until done (very light pinkish brown).
Now, be very careful transferring baked leaf to a safe place: it breaks very easy. Stack baked leaves on the flat surface and let cool. You need to bake your leftover trimmings too: you will crumble them and use them to decorate the torte.
Now to the fun part: icing. Keep in mind, that the torte is very moist when ready so you need to ice it where you serve it, no further transferring from plate to plate. It is not recommended to use decorating doily underneath either.
Place the first leaf, usually the thickest and sturdiest one, on the serving plate. Spread about 4 tablespoons of icing cream over it. Use more if needed. The idea is to cover all the surface evenly. Put the next leaf on the top and spread the icing again. Keep going until you have ugly looking stack of leaves with icing dripping all over. Place it in the high place to save from impatient kids and pets and let sit overnight.
Next morning you will find it very soft and shrunk to about half the heights it was yesterday, but the edges are still not perfect. Trim them off and feed trimmings to your kids and husband and they will be forever grateful.
Now crumble baked dough trimmings, mix them with coarsely chopped nuts if desired, and spread on the top of the torte. It is our family tradition to cut the torte in small squares like baklava, but it does not matter: nobody eats just one piece anyway. You don't have to refrigerate Napoleon right away, but if you have any leftovers after the feast, refrigerate them.