This recipe came about because I was randomly in the mood to make puff pastry from scratch. There are just those random days where I want a challenge, and making puff pastry is definitely one of those. Puff pastry is a kind of laminated dough, meaning you are folding butter and dough together to create these flaky layers that just break apart and melt in your mouth as you bite into each and every one of them. It is delicious, but extremely time-consuming and temperature sensitive. I find that making rough puff pastry(also called blitz puff pastry) saves a lot of time, but gets generally similar results. The main difference between regular puff pastry and rough puff is how the butter is incorporated. Regular puff requires a square slab or block of butter to be placed inside of a dough, and that is rolled, folded, and chilled repeatedly. This can be time-consuming to even just prepare the butter block itself. With rough puff pastry, you make a malformed dough with giant chunks of butter in it, and over time, you are folding, rolling, and chilling that to form your layers and gradually incorporate the butter into the dough and your layers. And that brings us to mille feuille. Mille feuille is a French dessert that translates to “a million leaves”. Some say it can also stand for “million layers” too. Basically it is a dessert made by layering up puff pastry with a cream filling. Other ingredients, like fruit, can be added too, just for color contrast and texture! In this case, making puff pastry is challenging enough, so we are focusing on puff pastry, pastry cream, and white chocolate snow just to keep it monochromatic and reminiscent of the winter.

For the recipe, we have rough puff pastry, a white chocolate pastry cream, and a white chocolate snow. I think it’s funny to say that the snow is the least difficult component, but it really is. You just take melted white chocolate, mix it with maltodextrin powder, and you have white chocolate snow. The hardest part, like I had already mentioned, was the rough puff pastry. It is a lot easier to make compared to regular puff pastry, but it still takes a lot of time to prepare. You need to make sure that the dough is properly refrigerated, but not so cold that it tears when you roll it out. I found that freezing for 30 minute increments work. If you need to step away from the dough to do other things, just let the dough sit at room temperature for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour before attempting the next roll and fold(depends on how long you leave the dough in the freezer for). There is a lot of patience involved in making it, but the end result is flaky deliciousness. It is such a satisfying feeling biting into homemade puff pastry and being able to crunch through all of those painstakingly difficult to make layers. The pastry cream is cool before we are relying on white chocolate to act as a sweetener here. Pastry cream is essentially a custard that is thickened with cornstarch, which we are doing here, and is usually finished with butter for a velvety texture. Here, we are still using butter, but we are also adding in the white chocolate, which contains cocoa butter, to add a more robust texture to the custard. All in all, I love eating these a little more than I loved making these, and if you want to make them with premade puff pastry, you totally can go for it. I might judge you slightly for that, but that’s on me, not on you.

For the rough puff pastry:
2 sticks unsalted butter, cubed and frozen solid
2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cups + 2 tbsp cold water
2 tbsp white or apple cider vinegar
a pinch of salt
1 egg
roughly 1/4 cup confectioner’s/powdered sugar

In a bowl, toss the butter with flour, just making sure that every cube is coated in flour. In another container, mix the water, vinegar, and salt together. Pour the vinegar-water mixture into the flour, and stir until the flour begins to form a dough that has large chunks of butter in it – you do NOT want the dough to be fully smooth. Refrigerate this dough for 20 minutes. Then on a floured surface, roll out the dough to be roughly 12 inches by 4 inches in size. Fold the dough brochure style (so in thirds), and rotate it 90 degrees. Freeze for another 30 minutes, and then repeat the rolling out, folding, and freezing steps one more time. Roll out the dough to be roughly 12 inches by 18 inches and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes, covered. On a floured surface, cut out desired shapes(I did hearts, but you can just do 4-inch rounds!). Place the pieces of pastry onto a lined sheet tray. Place a sheet of parchment/silpat on top of the pastry, as well as another sheet tray. Bake at 375 degrees F for 20 minutes. Then remove the sheet tray and top layer of parchment. Brush the tops of the pastry with egg yolk and dust on top of that some powdered sugar. Then return to the oven for another 10 minutes, still at 375 degrees F. Allow the pastry to fully cool before attempting to use.

For the white chocolate pastry cream:
1/2 cup whole milk
1/4 cup white chocolate chips
3 egg yolks
3 tbsp cornstarch
a pinch of salt
2 tbsp unsalted butter
1 tsp vanilla extract

In a pot, heat up the milk and white chocolate on low until the chocolate is fully melted into the milk. In a bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, cornstarch, and salt. Pour half of the white chocolate milk into the egg yolks while whisking, then pour that back into the same pot with the remainder of the white chocolate milk. Whisk the contents of that pot on medium heat until it forms a thick custard, with a similar texture to whipped cream. Take off heat and whisk in the butter and vanilla. Pass the custard through a strainer and store it in an airtight container, in the refrigerator, until cold to the touch.

For the white chocolate “snow”:
1oz white chocolate, melted
1/3 cup tapioca maltodextrin
a pinch of salt

Mix ingredients together until a fine powder forms. Store in an airtight until time to use.