The Real Mushroom Soup With Gougères

I have a Valentine's Day function to attend on Saturday night and the host has requested an appetizer from each guest. I will also be having high tea with another friend earlier in the day so that doesn't leave me with much time for preparation.

One of my friends on Facebook shared her fondness of gougères so I started to research some recipes. I've never made choux pastry before but that doesn't discourage me. AND the best part is that I can freeze gougères ahead of time. I'll just pop them into the oven before I leave on Saturday night. I found what I think is the perfect "Gougères" recipe from epicurious.com.

Well, it's a good thing that I baked up a couple gougères for lunch today. They were beautifully puffed after baking for 12 minutes.

Unfortunately, they sunk before I could even photograph them. I quickly took a bite and they were still raw in the middle so I placed them back into the oven for an additional 4 minutes. 

This time I had the common sense of touching them to make sure they were firm. All I could think was that I was lucky this was my test batch and that they came back to life.

I had the intention of serving the gougères with "The Real Mushroom Soup" by Jamie Oliver for lunch today. I placed the gougères back in the oven (to keep them warm) and started the soup.

Mushrooms are of course the star of the meal and I only had white button mushrooms on hand. I've made this recipe a few times before so I know it will still be good.

I usually like to saute everything a little bit longer but everyone was hungry so I had to make a few revisions.

I simmered the soup for about 15 minutes and skipped pureeing half of the soup.

I immediately added two heaping teaspoons of mascarpone. I then dished the soup out into the bowl, gave it a squeeze lemon juice, added three gougères on top, and served.

 

This is today's lunch and post in a hurry. I've linked the recipes if you'd like to try it out for yourself. I'll let you know how the gougères turn out on Saturday!