From The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Courtesan au Chocolat
Reconstructed
Serve when
Serve when a pale-pink Mendl's box is untied on screen and the little three-tiered pastries are revealed — the film's most beloved object, and briefly its most important.
In the movie
Theatrical
- Mendl's signature pastry, a three-tiered tower of choux glazed in pastel colours. Agatha bakes them, they're carried through the film in their iconic pink boxes, and at one point a batch is smuggled into prison with tools hidden inside.
Ingredients
Steps
- Make the choux: boil the water and butter, beat in the flour off the heat until it forms a ball, then beat in the eggs one at a time to a smooth, glossy paste.
- Pipe rounds in three sizes — large, medium, small — and bake at 400°F for 20–25 minutes until deep gold and hollow. Cool completely.
- Make the chocolate crème pâtissière: heat the milk; whisk the yolks, sugar, and cornstarch; temper together and cook to a thick custard, then whisk in the chocolate and vanilla. Chill.
- Fill each puff with the crème through a small hole in the base.
- Dip the tops: the large puff in pink, the medium in mint, the small in lavender. Stack the three, largest to smallest, and pipe fine white detailing so each looks like a tiny frilled courtesan.
In the movie
Wes Anderson gives the courtesan au chocolat the treatment usually reserved for a MacGuffin: it's beautiful, precise, symmetrical, and load-bearing to the plot (the prison break runs on a boxful). Like everything in the film, it's almost unbearably composed — which is exactly why recreating one, wobbles and all, is so satisfying.