Courtesan au Chocolat

If you haven't seen The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson's newest film, you're missing a wild ride -- and a dessert that plays a starring role. It's rare that pastry stars in a film, so I'm breaking from my blog mission of baking exclusively from vintage handwritten recipes, to bring you Courtesan au Chocolat.

The dessert, from the fictional bakery Mendls, consists of three cream puffs (pate au choux) filled with chocolate pastry cream, dipped in icing and stacked.

Start by making the cream puffs.

While they're baking, make the chocolate pasty cream.  This recipe requires two pastry bags -- one for the pate au choux and one for the chocolate filling.  And a third, if you decided to pipe white icing for a beautiful, but time-consuming, finale.

The toughest part was mixing the icing colors. Use a light hand, when adding the colors if you want to recreate the look of the dessert from the film.

You can find the recipe and a video and more details here.