gm frens!
I hope you had an amazing Christmas with your loved ones. I know I certainly did!
But let me tell you a little story about what happens behind the scenes of a perfect Christmas banquet.
Our neighbors and best friends, Ana and Pete host a Christmas lunch every year. They are both amazing human beings and they are both incredible in the kitchen, so we would definitely not miss this for the world. We all live downtown in downtown-sized apartments, so having anything more than a few friends over for dinner can be tricky. This year was a record with 22 souls invited to Christmas lunch. We knew this could mean trouble, so 
We said one line: We're here to help.
We were immediately let it and got to work, picking up all unnecessary furniture and decorations, sweeping the floors and stuffing everything in the guest room. Sofa, chairs, grill, plants... everything
Meanwhile, both Ana and Peter were in the kitchen. Ana was working on desert and peter had the oven going with a couple of surprises.
whew! "That was a lot of work", I said while I wiped the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve. maybe we should take a quick coffee break, yeah?
But why have regular coffee when you can have Irish coffee? 馃槃
yessir! it's Christmas and this sort of behavior is perfectly acceptable.
What are those things being baked in the background, you ask?
Those, my friend, are profiteroles or cream puffs. They are little choux pastry balls filled with whipped cream and glazed with caramel. The idea today is to make about 100 of these and assemble them into a type of pi猫ce mont茅e called croquembouches, which can be sometimes found at french weddings, baptisms and first communions.
Yep, Ana will be making this:
No problem, right?
Well let me tell you. First of all, these little shits are fragile. As soon as they come out of the oven, you need to poke a little hole in the bottom when they're still warm. The hole will be used to squeeze in the whipped cream once they cool down. If you don't do it just right, you'll break it and will have to throw it out.
Lucky for me, I was on recycling duty, which means I get to eat all the broken ones 馃槍
The second and biggest challenge is the caramel glazing.
The process of caramelizing sugar is to heat the sugar very slowly to 340 掳F until the molecules break down and turn into a brownish, sticky substance. You then find a way to dip the profiteroles in the boiling lava without burning yourself and let them cool so that they look like this:
Then, if you somehow managed to get the caramel cooked perfectly and without giving yourself third degree burns, you need to make another pot of boiling caramel to stick them onto the tree:
Yeah, that wasn't going to be that easy. They caramel got burnt and crystalized more than a few times, and when they did get the timing and temperature right right, it hardened too fast to get all of the cream puffs glazed.
Poor Ana got several nasty burns on her fingers in the process
And we even had to bring in one of Latin America's top 50 chefs to try and help 馃槃
This is chef Diego Telles of Flor de Lis. He's just a guest for today's lunch and not supposed to be in the kitchen, But desperate times call for desperate measures.
Everybody needed to take a wine break to get our ideas straight.
Our friends popped open a bottle of 2018 Schramsberg Brut Ros茅 for the occasion. A delicious fruitful aroma of strawberry, watermelon, orange and peach. Plenty of bubbles to tickle one's throat too.
ahhhhh! now that's better.
Even the pups got a fancy cork to play with
There you go Compadre, chew on that
Ding! the duck is ready too!
wow! look at that!
Pete will be making Dodine de Canard aux pistaches. Which is stuffed duck with pistachios.
A small slice to see what our friend looks like on the inside.
and....
perfection 馃憣
Right after the duck, came the ribs. This is a crown of blackened pork ribs stuffed with thai sausage.
This is what it looked like before they put the stuffing in.
The dogs seem to be really enjoying the show (and smell) of all of this
The guests started arriving so we ditch the idea of the croquembouches and improvise a little bit. One of the chefs suggested a butterscotch and drizzle it on top of the profiteroles.
The guests won't know the difference or the challenges Ana and the kitchen had to go though to get to this 馃槃
It'll be our little secret.
Want to see what the stuffed duck looked like once it was done?
And look at those ribs! they added stuffing and everything:
In the end, the table and all its elements looked gorgeous and everybody was happy. We ate splendidly, listened to good music and had delicious french wine all afternoon. What more could someone ask for?
We are incredibly grateful to have friends like this in our lives, friends who compliment this very short existence on planet Earth and make the journey much more enjoyable.
I hope you also had a merry Christmas with your loved ones. May you have a happy new year too. If you're lucky enough to be on winter holiday for the rest of the year, I hope you have time to disconnect from your daily activities and really enjoy some family time, eat the food you like and listen to the music that makes you happy.
But most important of all: If you're invited to a delicious, photo perfect banquet, please don't forget to thank the cooks!
They might be hiding loads of oven burns, cuts, late nights and a whole lot of stress while you take that bite out of that perfectly baked profiteroles.
Happy Holidays!
