An affairé with Pierre Hermé

Pierre Hermé! Pierre Hermé! Vous etes mon héros! Mon idole! Vous etes le maître des desserts. Je ne suis pas digne pour mentionner même votre nom. LOL. Pardon my french. It is atrocious. This is how I feel about this man who is acclaimed as one of the best and most creative patissiere in France, if not in the world. And his cookbooks are so difficult to get that when I saw the 'Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Hermé' at le Borders de Parkway Parade, I grabbed it like I would have grabbed a float when drowning and rushed home to pore over and intensely study every single page.

Décisions! Décisions! Hmmmm.... What should I make first? I was filled with trepidation. How dare I, a mere mortal, even try to make something that the revered Pierre Hermé created? C'est impossible! C'est une parodie! Anyway being the brave and foolish person that I was, I decided to make les sablés de chocolat et noisette (hazelnut chocolate cookie) and the la tarte de chocolat chaud et framboise (warm chocolate and raspberry tart).

However, you would need a fortune to buy raspberries and hazelnuts in Singapore. So I replaced the raspberries with cherries (which also cost a fortune but which I happend to have a punnet of in the fridge) and hazelnuts with almond slivers. And I make the tarts really small.

Voila! Here are the results. And again, forgive me for my French, s'il vous plait. Oo la la.

I think hazelnuts look very good on this cookie. The almond bits make the cookie looks very 'stingy' if you know what I mean. I followed exactly all the ingredients even using the terribly expensive Valrhona cocoa powder. Although it came out looking like the original, I find the taste too bland. So we ate it sandwiched between a layer of Nutella!

The tarts are quite delicious if you are not expecting a custardy chocolate filling. The chocolate filling is exactly like a fudgy brownie and even the method of making it and the ingredients are very much like for a brownie. We prefer this pastry than the one that I used for the other chocolate tart. But prefer the chocolate ganache to this brownie like filling.

My take on his recipes after trying two of them? Well. Let's just say that I probably need to look for another idol. This one did not live up to the promise.