Cream Puffs and Eclairs
This is another dessert that I have made but Aubrey hadn’t and she really wanted to make them so they made our list. And, again, they are new to her so they still fit our “rules”.
Cream puffs are pastries made with a dough called a “pâte à choux” or just a “choux”. The dough creates hollow, puffy pastries by way of steam rather than a leavening agent like yeast or baking soda. The dough is cooked twice with flour first cooked in boiling liquid, developing and denaturing the gluten. (I had to look up “denaturing” which is heating a protein until it loses its structure and becomes a long ribbon, instead of being folded up.) Once the dough is completed they are cooked again in the oven. They date back to France in the 1500’s with the queen, Catherine de Medici, having something to do with their creation…I say she hired a creative chef. (On a side note, when I read the history, I knew exactly who this queen was. If you have ever watched the TV series Reign, you know what I am talking about.)
I may be wrong, but I would guess that most people have eaten a cream puff…if you’re like me it was likely one of those frozen mini ones filled with whipped cream from Sam’s Club. 😉 In my younger days those were my go-to dessert when we had parties to attend. When we told Garrett we were making them, he mentioned that he loved the cream puffs we used to buy with ice cream in them. I had to inform him that it wasn’t actually ice cream but whipped cream; he just hadn’t waited long enough to let them thaw completely. To his disappointment, we were not filling ours with ice cream.
If you watch The Great British Baking Show, you know that a choux is pretty common for many desserts and can be temperamental. (One of my favorite contestants, Martha, went home for her choux failure.) Some of the desserts include profiteroles, eclairs, croquembouche, beignets, and cream puffs. Gougères are made by adding cheese (that sounds delicious).
We used a recipe from a cook book that we haven’t yet used this year. Pol Martin’s Supreme Cuisine is one of my oldest cook books (almost 30 years) and I have a handful of loved recipes that I have made several times (I’ve made the boeuf Bourguignon dozens of times and it’s delicious). The cook book is awesome because there are pictures of nearly every recipe and some of them have step by step photo instructions, the cream puffs happen to be one of those recipes.
Ingredients
- 1 cup water (250 mL)
- 1/4 tsp salt (1mL)
- 4 Tbsp unsalted butter (60 mL)
- 1 Tbsp granulated sugar (15 mL)
- 1 cup all-purpose flour (250 mL)
- 4 large eggs
- 1 beaten egg
Directions
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 C). Butter and lightly flour cookie sheet.
- Place water, salt, butter and sugar in heavy bottomed saucepan. Cook over medium heat. Continue cooking for 2 minutes after liquid starts to boil.
- Reduce heat to low. Add all of the flour and mix rapidly with wooden spoon. Cook dough until it no longer sticks to spoon or fingers when pinched. Be sure to mix constantly.
- Remove pan from heat and transfer mixture to bowl. Let cool 3 minutes.
- Incorporate eggs one at a time, mixing well between additions. Mixture must regain its smooth texture before next egg is added. The finished dough should be shiny and smooth.
- Fit pastry bag with plain, round tip. Fill pastry bag with dough and squeeze out shapes of your choice: the size of an egg for cream puffs or 4 inch long strips for eclairs. Leave space between each.
- Bake 35 minutes in the oven. Turn off heat and position door ajar: Let stand 45 minutes.
- When cold, fill with your choice of pastry cream or whipped cream. Glaze tops with caramel or chocolate if desired.
Our Experience
We assembled our ingredients as usual but didn’t get a photo. We were making both cream puffs and eclairs so we decided to make a double batch.
The water, salt, and butter.
The recipe is pretty easy and I’m not sure why people have difficulty making it. Maybe my step by step photo instructions are the key to my success. 🙂
After the water, salt, and butter are boiling, the flour is added ALL AT ONCE! This is an important step and might be the cause of some failures. The dough is cooked until it isn’t sticky. It’s a weird texture looks raw but not sticky. Kind of reminds me of a peanut butter cookie dough as far as consistency goes.
The dough has to cool a bit before adding the yolks otherwise the egg yolks will cook and that would be pretty gross!
We ended up stirring by hand (and when I say “we”, I mean me) and probably could have used the KitchenAid. Stirring by hand was hard work and messy! It takes a fair amount of stirring to incorporate the liquid yolks into a thick dough…plus, since it was a double recipe there was a lot of it.
After stirring the first yolk in, I thought I’d never make it adding 7 more. It was a workout, especially for this lazy baker who uses her mixer for just about everything. My arm muscles are going to be lopsided after this (my left handed stirring only works when it doesn’t require hard work…if that makes sense). Nobody knows how excited I was when Aubrey counted 8 as she dropped the last yolk in the bowl! 😉
My largest round pastry tip is about 1/2″ round and I might have liked a larger one, but, we used our available resources.
These pans give me a slight bit of anxiety because they aren’t evenly spaced. 🙂 We had no notes as to how many the recipe would make so it was all guessing and just kept going until we were out of dough, trying to squeeze them in as we went along.
The eclairs recipe only stated how long they should be but not how wide, I think they could have been wider but after the first couple were piped, it was too late to make the next ones bigger because we wanted them to cook evenly. Once they were all piped, we brushed them with the egg yolk as directed. We smoothed them out and probably shouldn’t have. The cream puffs that weren’t smoothed out puffed up better and more randomly like they’re supposed to.
We ended up having two full sheets and a partial small cookie sheet. We started with three sheets on three oven racks, which is not ideal unless you have a great convection oven (which, we do not!). We actually put the eclairs in about 5 minutes after the cream puffs because their sizes and different shapes made us think the cream puffs would take longer than the eclairs and, since they are supposed to cool in the oven and we only have ONE oven, we needed them to get done at the same time. About halfway through the baking, not only did we switch the pans to different shelves but we also consolidated them into two so the baking would be more even.
After they had cooled, we loaded them up into freezer bags and froze them for a week. We took them out on Saturday and it took 15 to 20 minutes to thaw out. We filled them minutes before we served them. We sliced the eclairs in half and piped the filling in them and poked holes in the bottom of the cream puffs and filled them from the bottom. Due to time constraints, we decided to fill these with our version of Cool Whip, see our trifle for the filling “recipe”. For the eclairs, I just melted some sugar free Hershey’s chocolate morsels and called it good! They were a bit messy because the chocolate was thick (if I had used some chocolate almond bark or added some shortening to the morsels, it would have been smoother), but nobody was rating them on their looks!
What we liked.
We loved them!! The fact that these freeze so well makes me want to make a few batches to put in the freezer. The filling we chose was really easy to make too. If I had these in the freezer, I could pull out the number I wanted and fill them as needed. One of the best things about cream puffs and eclairs is their size. They are small finger foods that don’t fill you up. They are also sweet but not too sweet. (I didn’t have one of the chocolate covered eclairs because I thought they’d be too sweet for me.) They were the perfect party desserts.
Since we made these and saved them for a “football” party, it was really easy to get feedback from new people. There were so many of them that even after several people ate more than one, we sent several home with departing guests (and nobody complained about it). While we understand that nobody is going to mention they don’t like them, we do know that they will comment if they do. We had a lot of people telling us how much they liked them so we are counting them as a success.
What we would change.
I really LOVE pastry cream and would certainly opt to fill these with it if time permitted. When I made them in the past, I filled them with pastry cream and they were VERY good and most definitely my preferred filling. The problem with the pastry cream is that you have to make a whole batch of it so you can’t just make a couple at a time and it doesn’t freeze well to either make the whole cream puff ahead of time or a batch of the pastry cream and freeze the leftovers.
We wouldn’t smooth them out with the egg wash either. For the eclairs, I might pipe them into bigger diameter logs and I think drizzling them with chocolate would be a lot easier. Since I am not a huge chocolate fan, I would probably like the less chocolate aspect of that method too.
What we learned.
Of course, the big learning experience this week was making a choux pastry dough. So, far, I haven’t experienced any difficulties with it so, as far as I am concerned, it’s a “make again” recipe. I just might try to get some in the freezer before Christmas!
Until next week, Happy Baking!