In France there is a chain of shops called Centrakor which sells a huge range of goods from buckets and saucepans to curtains and fancy dress party wear, similar to what you would find in The Range in the UK. It's a very handy group of shops and I was there recently to buy a new washing up rack. As I breezed past the bakeware section I spotted some cream horn moulds, three in a pack so I lashed out all of 6€ on two packs.
As it happens, I had also set eyes on a pack of the right kind of pastry in the freezer when hunting around for something for dinner a couple of days before. A roll of ready made, ready rolled puff pastry in an oblong shape.
I have never made cream horns before but they remind me of happy childhood days when Mum would come back from town on the bus with shopping and a selection of cream cakes as a special treat, carefully folded into a cardboard cake box by the lady in the bakery. A cream horn was one of my favourites.
They were incredibly easy to make, although very messy and a little time consuming. My worst fear was that having gone to all the trouble of making them they would stick to the moulds and come apart in bits but in fact they slipped off each one with no effort at all.
Just a word of warning though - these moulds are made of thin metal and in twisting them to release the pastry I managed to cut my finger. Another point to note is that even though I oiled the baking sheet they stuck slightly and had to be eased off gently. I would line with baking paper next time.
I followed a recipe on the Tesco website as a guide for what to do with the finished horns - in France they are called "cornets". I whipped up some cream, stirred through a handful of crushed raspberries and some caster sugar as a filling and decorated each one with a sprinkling of freeze dried raspberry chips which I also spotted in my cupboard.
The pack of pastry made twelve cornets (there was enough pastry to have made two more but I ran out of time) and they were a huge hit with a group of friends who volunteered to taste them. They were dainty and pretty and I shall definitely be making them for our garden party next month when some of us get together to celebrate the new king's coronation.
Ingredients
1 pack of ready made, ready rolled pastry, oblong (paté feuilletée rectangulaire) removed from the fridge 30 minutes before using
vegetable oil for oiling the moulds
1 egg, beaten
250 ml double or whipping cream
a handful of fresh raspberries (I'm sure frozen would work) crushed
2 dessertspoons of caster sugar
a few teaspoons of freeze dried raspberry chips to decorate
Method
Put some oil on your hands and slather it all over each cornet mould. Oil a baking sheet and line with baking parchment. Preheat the oven to 200°C / 180° fan / gas mk 6.
Unroll the pastry and cut it into 1 cm strips along the longest edge.
Take one strip and starting at the pointed end wind it diagonally around the first cornet mould, each ring overlapping the previous one slightly. Make sure there are no gaps.
Brush each cornet all over with beaten egg and sprinkle all over with demerara sugar.
Arrange on the baking sheet and bake for 10-12 minutes until crisp and golden brown.
Leave until cool then lift each one carefully off the baking sheet as they are quite fragile. To release the cornets, hold one in one hand and with the other give the mould a little twist and it should slip out. Always a nervous moment.
Depending on how many moulds you have, repeat the process until the pastry strips are used up.
To make the filling, put the cream into a medium bowl and whip until thick. Stir through the crushed raspberries and caster sugar.
Fill a piping bag or tube that has a star nozzle and gently squeeze the cream into the cornets. I found that pushing the nozzle right in ensured that the cream went all the way to the pointy end.
Sprinkle a few bits of freeze dried raspberries onto the open end for decoration. You could instead use a whole raspberry and even go further by dipping the point into melted chocolate.
Makes 12-14 cream horns.
These do look very inviting. I loved cream horns as a kid, although they weren't filled with lovely fresh cream like yours. In fact I'm not quite sure what it was in them and I think it's best that I never find out. I did see some cream horn moulds in a sale last year but I couldn't face explaining why I'd bought yet another baking mould so, sadly, I didn't buy them.
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