"La Religieuse", a classic French dessert that impresses with its flavor

La Religieuse was invented in 1856, in the Frascati pastry shop, a very famous place at that time. Being just a square of pump dough filled with custard.

This sweet acquired its voluptuous shape at the end of the century: a small donut resting on a large donut of pastry cream, glazed and decorated with butter cream.

It is rumored that this dessert would be called Religieuse (Nun) because of the color of its icing reminiscent of the dress of the nuns. Generally chocolate or coffee, the Religieuse is now declined in many other flavors.

Thus, the famous Casa La Durée does not hesitate to innovate with Religieuse of rose, violet, caramel, strawberry or orange blossom. So many perfumes to try.

Religious of coffee, ingredients

For the "choux"
7cl of water
75 g of flour
5g of sugar
5cl of milk
45 g of butter
2 eggs
a pinch of salt
For the coffee pastry cream
50cl of whole milk
6 buds
120g of sugar
45g of Maizena
1/2 tablespoon of soluble coffee
45g butter
For the glaze
90g of fondant
1 teaspoon of soluble coffee
For butter cream
120g of butter at room temperature
120g of icing sugar

Mix milk, sugar, salt and butter in a bowl. Put the mixture in a saucepan and reach the boiling point.

Add the flour after sifting it. Go mixing it until it is uniform.

Cook for a minute without stopping to move it so it does not burn. This step is simply to dry the dough and it is very important to mix with energy because you can grab the saucepan very easily.

Then put the dough in the blender with the shovel and at slow speed. If you do not have a blender, it does not matter, do it by hand with a wooden shovel. Add the eggs while batting the dough little by little. It is advisable to add the eggs two at a time and once they are well mixed, follow the same process until obtaining a homogeneous mass.

Put a baking paper on top of the tray so that the dough does not stick. Put the dough in a pastry bag and make balls of two different sizes. Some small ones that will serve us for the part above our religious and another larger one for the bottom part.

Cook at 200ºc for 15 minutes, until the color picks up.

Sablé de chocolate to the flower of salt
150 g Coverage 70%
175 g Loose flour
30 g Cocoa powder
150 g Butter
120 g Brown or brown sugar
50 g Sugar
3 g Salt flower or Maldon salt
1 branch of vanilla Tahiti

Elaboration

Knead the butter with the sugar the salt and the vanilla in a kitchen robot with the help of the shovel.
Add the flour together with the cocoa powder, previously sieved.
Finally, add the chopped chocolate and mix.
Spread in a can and let stand before using.

Stretch the dough with the help of a pastry roll 2 mm thick or so and cut discs the size of the pâte à choux that we want to make and place on top before cooking. In this way the pâte à choux will be cooked at the same time as the sable and so the religious will have a crispy texture on the outside and tender on the inside with an intense chocolate flavor.

Chocolate and praline cream

200 g pastry cream
50 g praline
50 g whipped cream
25 g chocolate 70%
Elaboration

Mix the praline with the whipped cream.

Melt the chocolate and mix it with the pastry cream (to mix the chocolate with the cream, this one has to be warm, around 35ºc to avoid that the chocolate crystallizes us by the cold and we obtain pieces of chocolate without mixing.) Finally , add the previous mixture and with the help of a spatula mix gently.

To fill the balls of pâte à choux we will make a small hole in the bottom part of the balls and with the help of a pastry bag filled with praline cream and with a fine nozzle, we will fill the balls. Paste the small ball on the big one, we'll use a little praline cream and that's it.

Creation of pastry cream

125 g sugar
125 g cream
375 g milk
40 g corn starch (cornstarch)
70 g yolks (4 units)

Elaboration

Separate the yolks from the whites. Heat milk, cream and half of the sugar in a saucepan. If you want you can add a vanilla branch, open it and scrape the inside with a knife. Put both the branch and the pulp in the milk.

Mix the cornstarch with the other half of sugar and the yolks in a saucepan. Bring it to a boil and move it constantly but without violence. If a lump has been made, pass it through a colander.

Add the first mixture (more liquid) to the second. Do it little by little, and move continuously. Put it to boil and then cool it in a marble.

Pick it up in a container and cover it with plastic paper to skin, that is, without any air between the plastic and the cream.