Baking & the Big Screen: Courtesan au Chocolat & The Grand Budapest Hotel
Sometimes, there are perfect opportunities for this series of articles, and this is one I didn’t see coming. I’m not the biggest Wes Anderson fan, but considering there was an actual baked good used in a plot line, I decided to give this one a shot. I also had been dying to try something with choux pastry, and it turns out that worked out better than I could have imagined. Ralph Fiennes’ character requests a delightful looking dessert called a courtesan au chocolat, a tower of choux buns that are filled which chocolate and covered in pastel colored glazes. For reasons I still do not understand, my attempt at this bake went impressively poorly, and I ended up liking the movie more than the results of an evening in the kitchen. Which was not what I expected to happen.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Starring Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Mathieu Amalric, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Jude Law, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Jason Schwartzman, Léa Seydoux, Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson, Tony Revolori
Director: Wes Anderson
Released in 2014
Available on Amazon Prime
The biggest pro I found in regards to this movie is that it had way more of a coherent plot than the other Wes Anderson films I’ve seen. I was fascinated to see exactly how everything was going to play out. Granted, Ralph Fiennes is such a solid actor that I’m automatically invested the second I realize he’s one of the people carrying the plot. His role is a concierge who takes his job very seriously, maybe too seriously, and it centers around one of his (intimately might I add) relationships with one of the wealthy guests (Tilda Swinton). When she surprisingly, suddenly passes away and leaves an extremely expensive piece of art to her beloved concierge, the whole movie turns into the most insane whodunnit, but in a baffling way.
It’s not even always clear what mystery we’re trying to solve, but we know there is one. The cast is filled with shady characters, all with a suspicious look or a cryptic past to really sell the bizarre world Anderson has created. There are the pastel colors, incredible set pieces and a sprawling cast to where it feels like you meet a new character every fifteen minutes. I still don’t know if his movies are for me, but in this (more so than The Royal Tenenbaums or Fantastic Mr. Fox) I understood the artistic style he’s created, and I can appreciate it more than I have before. I was entertained by the random, almost split-second cameos by some of his standard actors and the quiet but wonderful job a lot of the supporting cast does throughout the film.
While Saoirse Ronan as the almost entirely silent baker was still utterly charming to me, I was far from charmed by my attempt to duplicate her choux pastry masterpiece. I tried to follow the recipe exactly, but everything went wrong. I got the choux mixture perfect…and then was told to add the eggs. Which turned it into a straight-up liquid. And by the time I added enough flour to try to overcorrect and make it even remotely pipeable, it couldn’t grow in the oven. And since it didn’t expand, there was no place for the chocolate cream to go on the inside. Which also ended up too liquidy. Technically the glazes worked but by that point, it was a joke anyways. I probably would try to make it again, but I would be finding a more detailed recipe.