I have been in Michigan for about a week now, including a trip up North for skiing. Most of this time has been lost in a haze of sleeping in and indulging in large blocks of cheese, but I’ve spent some time perusing my Mary Berry cookbook as well. After arriving home from Petoskey, I decided to tackle something that has always fascinated me while watching episodes of the Great British Bake-Off: Choux pastry.
I decided to make Chocolate Eclairs using a very advanced and thoughtful method: I didn’t want to go to the store, and we already had all the ingredients.
Choux pastry is really weird: first you have to melt the butter in the water, then add the flour directly to the sauce pan.
You stir it until it forms a soft ball and comes completely away from the side of the pan. I was then instructed to add two beaten eggs a little at a time, and I had some trouble with this. I slowly added the eggs, but the dough became way too runny. The mixture didn’t seem pipe-able at all… I started over, this time adding less egg. Upon reflection, I think the problem is that my parents live in the middle of Amish country, and the eggs that they buy are local and beautiful and HUGE. The chickens around here are just too healthy, I guess.
I piped the dough out into eclair shapes…kind of. I would call my style abstract.
The truth is, I was going to make little ones but got impatient. Whatever, they actually looked pretty good when I first took them out of the oven.
Mary instructed me to cut open one side of each eclair as I took them off the baking sheet so that the steam could escape. I then started making the filling, and here’s where I have an issue with this recipe. It calls for plain whipped cream to fill them, and that’s what I did. Check out this carefully planned candid:
When I have had eclairs in the past, they were always filled with a custard. This is normally thick and overwhelmingly sweet. Most American (or Americanized) desserts are similarly sweet, and I’ve noticed that British baked goods do not follow this sugar crazed pattern. Maybe they don’t like things as sweet because they don’t have the expanse of Iowa to produce corn syrup? Maybe Mary Berry is just more of a grown-up than I will ever be? Or, maybe they eat more baked goods in general because of their daily tea-time ritual, and so don’t use as much sugar to control the waist-line. Whatever the reason, the whipped cream that I filled these eclairs with tasted like….cream. It was fine. But the child in me wanted something more indulgent. I melted some chocolate for the top, ate several while my Mom was distracted by the Notre Dame game, and saved the rest for “later.” (Read: any time I open the fridge for the next twenty-four hours.
The verdict: I wish these were sweeter, but I learned a lot from my first attempt at choux. They can’t have been too bad, because most of them are gone 🙂
If you’re wondering, these came from this excellent cookbook. I have made lots of things from this book and never been disappointed. If you want to bake this stuff, though, get yourself a food scale. Mary Berry doesn’t tolerate any non-metric system nonsense.
