Lappo
Moscow
When I was 13, I fell in love at first bite! It was a bite of the cake cooked by the hostess of the house my parents and I came to visit. I graduated with master’s degree in electrical engineering, and educated myself as a pastry chef. I worked as a pastry chef in a premium restaurant, then in a corporate catering restaurant. In the fall of 2020, my family and I moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and since then I have managed a lot! I got a job as a pastry chef at a big company and created many desserts that are successfully selling. I like to attend master classes of my colleagues — pastry chefs — and continue to progress in my favorite business in order to realize all my ideas; I have plenty of them!
MIRACLE NUTS
Ingredients
-
Shortbread cookies
- GRANDPRO Tart margarine 250 g
- White sugar 110 g
- Vanilla sugar 10 g
- Eggs 120 g
- Wheat flour 450 g
- Baking powder 8 g
- Lime cream
- Lime segments 75 g
- White sugar 90 g
- Gelatin sheets 2 g
- GRANDPRO Cream margarine 70 g
- Lime zest 2 g
- Lime tarragon gel
- Fresh tarragon 10 g
- Lime segments 80 g
- White sugar 30 g
- Water 80 g
- Agar agar 3 g
- Pectin NH 4 g
cooking
Shortbread cookies
- Whip GRANDPRO Tart margarine with white sugar and vanilla sugar to a fluffy mass.
- Add eggs to the mass.
- Sift the flour with baking powder and add to the dough. Stir well.
- Put the dough in an airtight container and place it in a refrigerator for at least an hour.
- Get the dough out of a refrigerator and form it into 6 g blanks.
- Bake cookies in a nut baker.
Lime cream
- Soak the gelatin in cold water.
- Put lime segments, eggs, and sugar together and blend.
- Pour the mass into a saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring constantly.
- Introduce gelatin into the mass.
- Add cold GRANDPRO Cream margarine to the hot cream; blend.
- Add lime zest to the cream.
- Cool the cream to room temperature.
- Transfer the cream to a pastry bag and fill the first halves of the future nuts with the cream (6 g of cream for each half).
- Put the halves in an airtight container and place them in a refrigerator for 30 minutes.
Lime tarragon gel
- Chop tarragon leaves with a knife.
- Mix lime segments, water and chopped tarragon leaves in a bowl.
- Blend and let in to infuse for 20 minutes. Strain.
- Mix sugar, agar agar and pectin.
- Pour this mixture into the lime mass. Transfer to a saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring the mass constantly with a whisk.
- Pour the gel into a container and cool in the refrigerator.
- Before use, blend the gel and transfer it to a pastry bag.
- Fill the second halves of the future nuts with the gel (6 g for each half).
- Put the halves in an airtight container and place them in a refrigerator for 30 minutes.
Assembling the «nut»
- Melt 50 g of milk chocolate. Pour the melted chocolate into a pastry bag.
- Squeeze a thin line of chocolate along the edge of the first nut half; cover the second half with lime tarragon gel on top.
- Top the nut with Candurin gold shimmer.
I was inspired to create this dessert by Alexander Pushkin’s «The Tale of Tsar Saltan». I have chosen the filling for a reason: both the cream and the gel have an emerald shade, which is very important in this case. The point is one of my tasks was to bring the dessert presentation as close as possible to the description of nuts in the Pushkin’s fairy tale: «all the shells are golden, the kernels are pure emerald.» I made leaves and a twig for decoration from tempered white chocolate colored in a green shade. I decided to serve the nuts in a handmade birch bark casket purchased at the Novgorod Museum of Wooden Architecture.
I really enjoyed working with GRANDPRO margarine: it whips very well and has a pleasant flavor.