(festive music) (patissier speaking in Japanese) - [Alvin] Hello there! Welcome back to another
episode of "Anime with Alvin." Today, I'm making the
whimsical patissier's parfait from one of my favorite
anime, "Darker Than Black." Now, this thing is pretty intense. It's got, like, 10 components that I wanna make from scratch. So let's get started. This parfait seems to have four flavors, so I'm making a batch of creme
en glace or ice cream base that will be enough to make all four. I'm combining 15 ounces of whole milk with 12 ounces of heavy
cream in a big saucepan, stirring to make sure
that it doesn't burn, and bringing it to a boil. After taking it off the heat,
I'm moving over to the table, where I'm combining six large egg yolks with about seven ounces of sugar. This is so I can slowly pour
in that really hot milk mixture into the egg yolks, whisking to make sure that they don't overcook,
and once that's ready, I'm pouring this egg
mixture back into the milk and heating it on the stove again until around 180 degrees Fahrenheit, stirring the entire time to make sure that I don't curdle the eggs. Once we hit the number we
want, I'm moving it back and splitting it up
between four containers. In the first container, I'm
making chocolate ice cream by adding an ounce of cocoa
powder, a little bit of salt, and some vanilla extract. The next ice cream flavor
is a good old vanilla, which we're making by adding
a teaspoon of vanilla extract and a teaspoon of salt. In the next container,
we have matcha ice cream by mixing in matcha powder
and sugar into the base. For the final flavor, well, that gets a little special treatment. Fresh strawberry ice cream has to be one of the best things in the world. It's honestly super simple,
but when it's done right, oh, that stuff hits good. I'm cutting up about 10
ounces of strawberries, then mixing it with
around two ounces of sugar and two teaspoons of lemon juice, macerating it for about an hour or so. After the sugar starts to work its magic, I'm blitzing it into a paste and straining it to
concentrate the flavor. And to make the ice cream,
I'm simply adding spoonfuls of this concentrate into
the creme en glace base until I'm satisfied, which
probably means I'm adding a lot. This now-strawberry-speckled mixture is going into an ice cream machine, where it's gonna churn
for about 20 minutes. However, I'm still not satisfied with the strawberry content, so I'm continuously adding more and more and more until I am told to stop or else the ice cream
machine will not work. At this point, it is delicious. It's like soft serve. You can definitely eat it, and
that's exactly what we did. A quick little team QC to
make sure that it's good. Confirmed. The ice cream is now ready to be covered with a square of parchment and
placed in the freezer to set. The parfait from the show seems
to have a chocolate zigzag that caresses the top of the ice cream, so we're gonna make a hot fudge sauce by combining 300 grams of sugar,
150 grams of cocoa powder, and a little bit of salt. Let me just give this a quick stir. Oh. I have spilled everywhere. Thank you, Kendall. Remember, kids, if you're not
spilling when you're cooking, you're just cooking. Let's continue. 240 grams of water and
100 grams of glucose syrup to make it shiny. Once the sauce is free of lumps,
smooth, glossy, and shiny, I'm now moving it into a
squeeze bottle for later. The parfait seems to have
a chocolate cream puff perched right in the
middle of the ice cream, so we're gonna make chocolate choux pastry by combining 500 grams of water, 225 grams of cubed unsalted butter, about a tablespoon and a half of sugar, and a teaspoon of salt in a big pot. After this comes to a boil, I'm adding in 200 grams of bread flour and 50 grams of cocoa powder,
stirring and making sure that everybody is evenly incorporated. Once everybody in the
pot seems to be friends, I'm gonna start adding eggs. This is the part that I kinda hate about making choux pastry. Everything gets all slimy
and weird and separated, and it doesn't look like it's gonna work, and you're sitting there stirring, your hand's getting tired, and
you're thinking to yourself, "What did I do to deserve this?" And just when all hope
starts to disappear, things start coming together, and you start to believe in baking again. Now, this batter looks pretty delicious. I'm gonna give it a taste. Oh. This did not turn
out the way I had hoped. That's raw. As I'm piping this
stiff but smooth batter, I can't help but notice that
it kinda feels like piping... You don't need me to tell you
what it feels like I'm piping. Once these shapes have been piped, I'm now dipping my finger
in a little bit of water and pressing the little
tip of each one down so that things don't
get weird in the oven. These go in a pretty strong
convection oven at 375 until what we have resembles the puff part of the cream puff. The parfait from the
show seems to have layers of a white cream, so I'm interpreting this as a vanilla pastry cream,
which we can also use to fill our chocolate cream puff. So for our eighth component, I'm combining 600 grams of
milk, 75 grams of sugar, and a teaspoon of salt
into a large saucepan and letting that come to a boil. While that's going, I'm
mixing 75 grams of milk with 60 grams of corn
starch and 25 grams of sugar to create a corn starch slurry of sorts. And while that's doing its thing, I'm combining a couple eggs
with about 100 grams of sugar. You might notice that the
process for making pastry cream is a little similar to the process for making the creme
en glace from earlier, which involves tempering
the hot milk into the eggs. And once the eggs are happy, we're pouring this mixture
back into the milk, adding scraped and seeded vanilla pods and a little bit of salt, and returning that back to the heat. Once this starts to boil, I'm adding in that corn
starch mixture from earlier and whisking this until it is thickened and does not taste like corn starch. And now, I'm finishing this with about 70 grams of
cubed unsalted butter, which will only do good
things for this pastry cream. Mmm. This stuff's really good. I enjoyed quite a lot. To cool this down, I'm
moving this into a tray lined with plastic wrap to
prevent the skin from forming. This pastry cream goes
to chill in the fridge for a little bit, and now we
are on our ninth component and possibly one of my favorites: mochi. This is shiratamako, a type of rice flour that is used to make soft mochi. I'm combining 100 grams of
this with 90 grams of water and mixing it until it
becomes a rough dough. This dough now gets
turned into a dough snake. Cut into roughly one-inch segments and roll into balls
smaller than a golf ball but larger than a blueberry. Once my little mochi
army has been assembled, they're now plunging into boiling water for about three to five
minutes until they float and cooking for another two
to three minutes after that. Once they're ready, they get to come straight out of the hot
tub and into an ice bath to maintain their bouncy texture. I've eaten 10 of these by now. Before we get to our
final, tenth component, we do need to churn this
rest of the ice cream, so I'm repeating the same process that we did with our strawberry ice cream with our chocolate, matcha,
and vanilla batches, letting them churn until
they've reached the consistency of soft serve and transferring
them out into a container. And the most crucial
part: tasting your food to check for poison from enemies. Everything seems to be in order. I think we are clear to move on. A square of parchment paper
to prevent freezer burn, and these go off to set. The tenth and final component
we are making from scratch are the waffle cones
flanking the ice cream. We're gonna make a batter
by combining sugar, egg, flour, salt, butter,
milk, and vanilla, a pretty standard waffle cone batter. And to give that signature
waffle cone look and smell, we got our hands on a waffle press that has those famous ridges. A few tablespoons of batter right into the middle of
the hot press, a press, and cooking for about two to
three minutes until it's ready. The instructions say to
only use a cone roller, but I do not trust instructions
and you only live once, so I'm going to use my hands. After rolling up a few cones, I can no longer feel my fingertips, but we have waffle cones. At long last, it is finally
time to build this parfait. You might notice that there
are a lot of other things on the table, which
were seen in the anime. First, I'm laying down a
base of chocolate fudge sauce and using crushed-up waffle
cones, pastry cream, more sauce, more cones, and more pastry
cream to build the base. Once we start getting close to the top, I'm putting in a layer of the soft and delicate mochi that
we had made earlier, which will provide a
nice textural contrast. The anime never mentioned
how they built this thing, so I'm using a lot of guesswork and 75% of an engineering degree to try to make this thing work. I'm hoping that by making a base with the choux pastry torn
up and some pastry cream, I can get the ice cream
on a little bit better. Once I have a flat surface to work with, I'm nestling a nice, big
filled chocolate cream puff right in the middle. This will help provide a
centerpiece for our fruit to flank. We have our cantaloupe slices on the right and our bananas on the left. Now it is time to proudly display our painstakingly crafted ice cream. A scoop of vanilla ice cream
straight down the middle, a scoop of strawberry on the right, and a scoop of the matcha on the left. But this is where I get nervous, because things are gonna start melting. As the minutes drag on and
the parfait gets taller, I realize that I'm in an
all-out war against this thing. There's whipped cream. There's fruits. There's strawberries. There's blueberries. There's almonds. There's sandwich wafers. There's ice cream that's melting. There's things that are falling over. There's Kendall, who is
valiantly swooping in and cleaning off the drips
that you guys are not seeing. But after approximately
four minutes and 23 seconds of battling gravity, temperature,
and structural integrity, I present to you our version of the whimsical patissier's parfait from "Darker Than Black," a dessert that was only given two frames in the entire duration of the whole show. So I gotta say, I'm pretty
proud of what we've made. To no one's surprise,
this thing is crazy good. Fresh ice creams are wonderful. The textural contrast between
all of our layers are great. I am more than happy to
share this with the team that we have in the studio today. Some of the best parts about making crazy and large portions of food
is that you get to share it with the people that you care about that are with you at the time. I'm not sure if you can tell,
but we are having a blast, along with a massive sugar rush, so we're gonna cut the video before it shows us all falling asleep. (upbeat music)
