What a wonderful pastry! Traditionally made with alternating layers of puff pastry (mille-feuille) and pastry cream, then decorated with a shiny poured fondant and chocolate drizzle pattern of varying designs, it is elegant, delicious, and graphically beautiful.

I read through many online recipes, as well as my stand by Pastry book: The Pie and Pastry Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum, to gather the construction details I needed to create this quintessential pastry in The Cardboard Kitchen. I also looked through hundreds of photo’s from my talented Flickr friends. I used my Flickr friend Jen’s Photography food set as the resource for my primary image reference. Her Chocolate Napoleon not only gave me the graphic line quality I was looking for, it is also up close and personal luscious!

I had to ‘shop’ for four key ingredients: puff pastry; pastry cream and white poured fondant. Fortunately  I had  a small amount of chocolate glaze in The Cardboard Kitchen pantry from another baking project.

I began with  my hunt for the pastry, and found the perfect mille-feuille in a furniture store recyling bin. I think you will agree that, although it may not have “a thousand leaves”, after a little kneading  and folding, it looks like flaky layers of puff pastry!

The most difficult ingredient to find was the pastry cream. It had to be the perfect color and just the right texture to create the slight ooze between the layers of mille-feuille.

The  shiny poured fondant was created from a shipping box which once held wire shelving. The ink used to print on the background layer of this box provided just the right sheen.

The traditional chevron pattern is created by piping the chocolate glaze onto the white glaze  and pulling it through before the glazes are set up. Using this technique, the piped chocolate appears to be raised ever so slightly above the shiny poured fondant. In art we call this a bas-relief!

Of course there is no way to pull chocolate cardboard through white cardboard fondant, so to achieve this bas-relief feel, I inlaid it. No need to mention how many times I had to do this over to achieve the perfect glazed top, let me just say YIKES….

The  pièce de résistance  was my find of a discarded and torn section of architectural board: the type used by architects to make their fantastic models. It made the perfect pastry wrapper to prevent sticky fingers.

Although you can’t eat it, I think you’ll agree the Napoleon baked in The Cardboard Kitchen is visually delicious!

Get your cupcakes on bakers!  If you are baking in the “other” kitchen, let’s see your batter, bowl and spoons and your oven center stage. This little “Mini Cupcake With Buttercream and Cherry On Commemorative Silver Dessert Stand” is the October prize for the Iron Cupcake Competition.

And this cupcake was baked to order in The Cardboard Kitchen. That’s why it comes complete with a silver dessert stand: in the Cardboard Kitchen we can perform such magic as making silver out of gray cardboard.

Here are the specifics: height to top of cherry: 4 1/2″; width including stand: 3″. And your little cupcake arrives with a list of ingredients. Wait till you see what it’s made of!  So have fun and bake your pans off!

Read the winning recipe!: Muffin Cupcake House. Congratulations Fabiola!

I’ve  been baking lots of sweets in The Cardboard Kitchen lately. This cupcake was inspired by all the amazing cupcakes that are produced in the kitchen’s of the Flickr bakers. If you look closely at the mise en place pic below, you can see  that this cupcake, in the center of my work table,  is almost finished. In the same pic I am working on the fondant rose.

I bake just like all bakers: I need the cupcake paper first so I create that first; then the cake, the frosting, decorate, and place the finished cupcake on the doily which I create to fit. And those Flickr bakers are so right when they say in order to make a fondant rose, you have to practice, practice, practice!  I had to make the roses for this cupcake twice before I got it right!

Welcome to The Cardboard Kitchen! It’s a busy place, so I keep it organized. There are utensils, pantry items sorted by color and use, and the necessary odd bits to keep in order. Although not visible here, I use post- it’s as recipe cards. This helps me to keep track of each ingredient in each piece. If I use the wrong ingredient in a particular piece, it tastes terrible!

So how do I organize all this cardboard: enter the pantry.

When a box arrives in The Cardboard Kitchen, I notate in pencil the origin of the box and it’s original function. It then gets sorted into the pantry. Although every piece gets sized down,  and no matter the size large or small, it retains it’s name and origin. That’s why when you receive your delicious no-cal food in the mail and read the ingredients list, you know just what it’s made of.

It’s amazing that eventually I begin to recognize the crumbs floating around: the ones stuck to my clothes or glued in my hair. It’s the same phenomenon as the “other” kitchen: you say to yourself  “I’ve got  that cookie dough in my eyebrow”. I say to myself  “this clump glued on my shirt is from that UPS box I was cooking with”!