Blueberry & Vanilla Custard Brioche

Forty-three years of attending the finest tables in three continents, and still a brioche has the audacity to surprise me. This one arrived — golden, imperious, dusted in icing sugar like it had recently passed through a light Alpine snowfall — on a plate of such exquisite botanical chinaware that I was briefly uncertain whether I was meant to eat the pastry or simply absorb the whole composition as one absorbs a Flemish still life. The floral motifs trailing around that porcelain rim are doing considerable work, and they know it. So, rather magnificently, does the brioche. Those blueberries. Those blueberries. Heaped into the custard well with what I can only characterise as gleeful disregard for restraint, roasted to a deep, lacquered violet-black that borders on the operatic — they are not garnish, you understand, they are protagonists. The vanilla custard visible in creamy pools between the fruit is playing an excellent supporting role, anchoring the whole dramatis personae with quiet authority. Meanwhile the crumble fragments scattered across the bronzed flanks of the brioche suggest a baker who began with a plan and then, quite rightly, abandoned it in favour of inspiration. Royal Decree: Be it hereby known that this Blueberry & Vanilla Custard Brioche is declared the mandatory centrepiece of all diplomatic breakfasts hosted within the Empire, and is furthermore banned from being served to Members of Parliament on sitting days, lest they abandon the nation’s business entirely and simply sit there in a state of glazed contentment. One understands the temptation. One has been there. The golden dome of that brioche — baked to the precise shade of a well-oiled saddle, structural yet yielding, proudly domed yet generously cratered where the custard has set — speaks of a baker with genuine conviction. At Crumbleworth Hall we have hosted duchesses, three minor European royals, and on one unforgettable occasion a very opinionated Viennese pastry chef who wept openly at our table. None of them, I submit, would have left a single crumb of this on the plate. Neither, I confess with absolutely zero embarrassment, did I.