Baking & the Big Screen: Napoleons & Eat Pray Love
I’ll admit, this month’s installment took a bit longer to get together than I expected. But that’s because I reached a little higher than I normally do when it came to the baking goal. I had created a list of a few movies that could be tangentially related to baking - and top of that list was Eat Pray Love. It’s in the title, right? Eat! Surely something of that type would have to be cake, pastry or cookie based.
And it was! Lo and behold - a thing I wasn’t sure I’d heard of before - Napoleons. (Until I looked it up and realized I’d seen it on Great British Bake Off with it’s other name: mille-feuille.) It’s a blink-and-you-miss it moment. Liz (Julia Roberts) meets a new friend in a super crowded cafe - Sofi - and she asks if Liz likes Napoleons. She says of course, Sofi orders them and they indulge. That’s it. Nothing more. But for some reason, it stuck out to me, and I’d never made pastry dough before and I was hooked on the idea.
Eat Pray Love
Starring Julia Roberts, Billy Crudup, Viola Davis, James Franco, Javier Bardem
Director/Writer: Ryan Murphy
Released in 2010
Available on Netflix
The movie was far better than I could have hoped for. I expected it to be a bit more hippy-dippy than it ended up being. Julia Roberts was charming - which is what I should have anticipated, because when is she not? I didn’t know too much about the movie itself (more about the book it was based off of) so I was shocked when famous guy after famous guy appeared to try to woo Julia Roberts. Crudup, Franco, Bardem. One after another. It was impressive how many people they managed to sneak into this movie about a woman going off to find herself.
I basically expected this movie to be a film version of the blog post that explains how a woman magically was able to quit her job, travel the world and somehow not worry about money anymore, but thankfully, that wasn’t really a part of it. I was confused a bit about how the logistics worked, but the story was interesting enough that I didn’t quite care and was more intrigued as to how she was going to end up - and what she was going to learn about herself, not what she was going to teach me.
Thankfully, what I did learn from all of this is that I can make pastry! I am still so excited about this that it’s worth using an exclamation point. Napoleons are simple in theory: layers of pastry and pastry cream, then topped with a royal icing. But making pastry is an exhaustive process. Lots of time and layering that makes me wonder how on earth Bake Off contestants do these things in a matter of hours. This was a super time intensive process. Took me a Saturday afternoon and two evenings, and while that was a fairly leisurely pace, I still can’t fathom how you do that. But hey - this turned out shockingly delicious and I conquered something I never thought I’d do - make pastry dough from scratch, and that’s worth a lot.