Vanilla slice
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| Alternative names | Napoleon, gâteau de mille-feuilles, vanilla slice or custard slice |
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| Type | Pastry |
| Place of origin | France |
| Main ingredients | Puff pastry, pastry cream, powdered sugar |
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The mille-feuille (French pronunciation: [mil fœj], "thousand-leaf"),vanilla slice, custard slice, also known as the Napoleon, is a French pastry whose exact origin is unknown. Its modern form was influenced by improvements of Marie-Antoine Carême.
Traditionally, a mille-feuille is made up of three layers of puff pastry (pâte feuilletée), alternating with two layers of pastry cream (crème pâtissière), but sometimes whipped cream or jam are substituted. The top pastry layer is dusted with confectioner's sugar, and sometimes cocoa, pastry crumbs, or pulverized seeds (e.g. roasted almonds). Alternatively the top is glazed with icing or fondant in alternating white (icing) and brown (chocolate) stripes, and combed.
All the elements of the recipe are present in numerous cookbooks since, at least, the 16th century but the exact origin of the mille-feuille is unknown. The earliest mention of the name mille-feuille itself appears in 1733 in an English-language cookbook written by French chef Vincent La Chapelle. Unlike the modern cake, the 18th-century Mille-feuille is served stuffed with jam and marmalade instead of cream.
In French, the first mention of the Mille-feuille appears a little later, in 1749, in a cookbook by Menon.
To make a mille-feuille cake, you take puff pastry, make out of it five cakes of equal size, & of the thickness of two coins, in the last one you shall make a hole in the middle in the shape of a Knight's cross, regarding the size you will base yourself on the dish that you will use for service, bake them in the oven. When they are baked & cooled, stack them one on the other, the one with the hole on top, & jams between every cake, [sentence unclear, maybe referring to covering all sides with jam] & ice them everywhere with white icing so that they appear to be a single piece; you can embellish it with some red currant jelly, candied lemon skins & pistachio, you serve them on a plate.
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Wikipedia