In the Year of Fearless Baking: Episode #10: Cream Puffs

Guys, I feel myself falling head over heels for French pastry. Seriously- how the hell did they figure this stuff out? Making choux pastry, the magical foundation of cream puffs, may be an even stranger process than laminating dough between layers of butter. And by strange, I mean glorious.

Unfortunately, there are several steps of the procedure that I was unable to get photos of, because, well, my hands were too busy. Basically, to make choux, you cook water, butter and flour on the stove (it reminds me of making playdough as a kid). This gelatinizes the starch and makes the batter super flexible. Then you add eggs and beat the hell out of it (as an aside: yes, I used this hot pink plastic ‘wooden’ spoon).

And then you pipe it into little blobs. Don’t worry: getting better at piping is totally on my list. I’m still pretty bad at it, but fortunately in this case it didn’t matter too much.

I really wanted to try out the crackly sugar topping known as craquelin, but since I was nervous about how it would come out, I only used it on half of the puffs. It’s basically like cookie dough that becomes pure crunchy glory once baked.

The transformative power of heat is just amazing. The piped blobs somehow become crisp hollow shells, which are basically screaming to be filled with pastry cream. Fortunately, pastry cream is not something I’m afraid of.

Vanilla beans are so freaking sexy. Have I mentioned this before? Goddamn.

Filling the puffs was a little odd- once again, because I absolutely suck at piping. But at the end of the day, they got filled- albeit unevenly.

And then we got to share them with wonderful people, which is always the best part of these adventures.