Portuguese Pastry Mil Folhas Part 2

On February 22, 2017, I posted about my foray in to making mil folhas, my favorite pastry. It didn’t go so well. But I REALLY love these pastries, and I’ve never been a quitter. So I tried again, even though my cooking skills are not what they should be for a mom with seven kids.

I used the same puff pastry I made the first time, since I had a bit extra left over that I’d frozen, but this time I cooked it longer and didn’t overly poke it with holes. It turned out great! The only drawback was that I didn’t have a lot of dough left so I had to make it thinner than I wanted it.

Then we tried a new recipe for the filling my daughter Catia found. This one consisted only of water, egg yolks, and sugar.

Six egg yolks
6 TBS granulated sugar
6 TBS of water

So basically, for each egg yolk, you add a tablespoon of sugar and water. You boil the water and sugar, pour it slowly into the eggs, stirring constantly, and then you put the whole thing back on the stove for cooking until it thickens. We didn’t use any thickening agent besides the sugar which thickens as it cooks.

We did this new recipe twice, because we didn’t make enough the first time, and the second time shown in the picture below, we didn’t quite get it thick enough, but at least we do know how to do it. Note that in the pastries they sell in Portugal, they trim all the edges off to have nice clean lines. We haven’t done that yet.

For the glaze, this time we put butter and milk with the powdered sugar to make it taste better. I didn’t make the mistake of darkening the frosting with vanilla extract. And we mixed the melted chocolate for the designs with a portion of the frosting so it would flow better.

And guess what? It was yummy! Very yummy! (Note: yummy is a word you use a lot when you have kids.)

This filling still wasn’t exactly the same as the real Portuguese pastry, but a lot closer than when we tried it using milk, which made it too much like custard. I still plan on finding out the exact recipe for the filling, and I have a few ideas to try, but the bottom line is that these were great and everyone liked them. Yay!

Here are the side by side pictures of the first (not very good) ones from two weeks ago and the new (good) ones from last Sunday. Even the look is so different! I’m learning.

Copyright 2017 Teyla Rachel Branton

Reuse notice: you are free to print for personal use or non-commercial use with friends, share this post link anywhere, quote a short excerpt with attribution and a link to this site, but you may not use this post in its entirety on your own page. Thank you for caring about copyright.