Bake 52 Week 40: Eclairs

This week we made Eclairs.  The recipe called for a pastry bag to make the shells and to pipe in the pastry cream.  I didn't have one and did my best with a ziploc.  It worked fine for the shells but not for piping in the cream...but as usual I'm getting ahead of myself.

Saturday night I whipped up the pastry cream.  It's the same recipe we used for the fruit tart.  So I didn't take any pictures but this time I made sure I had everything prepped before I started since I remembered it went so quick last time.  It seemed very simple and not that fast since I had the ingredients already prepped.

Sunday morning I got started on the Pate au choux.  It was surprisingly easy as well.  I beat the eggs and egg white and then assembled the rest of the ingredients.  Water, butter, milk, sugar and salt in a pan. 

 Flour pre-measured and set aside. 

The recipe sounded like it would move quick so I had my food processor out and ready to go before I started cooking the dough. 

It came to a boil pretty quickly.  I removed it from the heat and dumped in the flour.  Then it was back on the heat to cook it until it looked like wet sand.  

It was also supposed to get to 175-180 degrees.  But after cooking for about 5 minutes and having it sit stubbornly at 150ish I decided I had spent enough time fussing with it and it would have to be good enough...

The dough went in the food processor.  I started it up and then dumped in the whipped eggs.  The dough came together nicely...

I spooned all the dough into a gallon ziploc and then snipped off a corner to substitute for the pastry bag. 



It worked okay...  I probably could have done better if I'd spent a little time figuring out how to fit all 8 in a row and how long they actually should have been.  But luckily a wet finger smoothed out the mess.

All ready to go in the oven.  

After 15 minutes at 400 and then 8 minutes at 350 I took them out and cut the side to release the steam.  They probably could have cooked  a little longer.  But they looked pretty good.  I stuck them back in the overn (with the door proped open) for 45 minutes.  Then I moved them to a wire rack and went to church. 

After church I cut three holes in the top of each shell and tried to pipe the cream into them. 

It would have worked perfectly if I'd had a metal tip on the bag.  But I couldn't get the tip of the plastic bag in the little holes.  So it mostly just smeared out on the top...

Since I wasn't making these for anyone and was only interested in getting everything together well enough to taste what it should taste like I decided to do what Jonathan suggested and cut off the top and just spoon the pastry cream in.  

Once I had filled the shells I made the icing quickly (so quickly that I had lots of little powder sugar clumps in it) and spread that over everything so you couldn't see the cuts. 

Messy but the taste was spot on!  I had two.  Jonathan stopped at one and a half.  He's got more self-control than me.  :-)

Not being much of an Eclair fan myself I'll probably never make these again.  But if you are a fan you should try this recipe.  It tasted just like the best fresh baked top of the line Eclairs...  I've had a few in my time.  These are very popular at business events...

Check out Jenn's blog for the full recipe.