Perfecting karpatka, a show-stopping dessert | Canada Voices

Welcome to The Globe’s Recipe Lab, where food culture reporter Dakshana Bascaramurty explores what makes recipes work well.

If you are the person who always volunteers to make desserts for gatherings, you are probably a show-off who thrives on external validation. I know this because I am this person. At the dinner parties I attend, we clear the plates and bring out dessert with ceremony. The pressure is high, but so is the glory if you nail the execution.

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Every month for the past three years, I’ve gotten together with the same group of five friends at one of our homes and I always bring dessert. I’ve made tarts, pies, mousses and even a Baked Alaska. There have been goofs along the way, but my friends always obediently ooh and ahh. Each month presents an opportunity to challenge myself but, more importantly, to impress.

The objective

A show-stopping dessert that tastes like it came from a patisserie.

As a starting point, I thought of my favourite desserts. Many of them – Paris-Brest, profiteroles and éclairs – are made with choux pastry. You prepare choux by cooking milk, water, butter and flour on the stove and then later mixing in eggs. Then you pipe it out of a pastry bag and bake it.

I’d always been intimidated by the twice-cooked pastry and my piping skills are shaky at best, but then I learned about the Polish dessert karpatka. Instead of piping it, you bake the choux in two cake pans, sandwich cream between the choux discs and slice it like a cake.

I was drawn to a plum-and-mascarpone karpatka recipe found in London-based pastry chef Nicola Lamb’s cookbook Sift. The first half of the James Beard Award-winning Sift is very much a textbook, where Lamb explains concepts like starch gelatinization (which, in choux, is responsible for the beautiful puff that happens during baking). Knowing the science behind each step made me more willing to diligently follow the recipe.

“This is a great way that people can learn how to make choux stress-free,” she told me on Zoom call. “Everyone can spread choux in a tin.”

The process