Chocolate Éclairs and a New Blog

Welcome to my new blog! And what better way to inaugurate it than with decadent chocolate éclairs?

These were a request from my dad who loves all of his pastries with a generous helping of whipped cream. They were also a great opportunity to try out my new Wilton Dessert Decorator Plus which I got for my birthday two and a half weeks ago. I LOVE IT. Goodbye messy pastry bags. I will miss you not.

After my first failure at making pâte à choux last week I was a little bit afraid to try again. The first recipe I tried was from Baking with the Cake Boss by Buddy Valastro. I must have done something horribly wrong to upset the Gods of pastry because the final result was an overly soft dough that didn’t hold its shape when piped and baked into a soft, flat and eggy cookie-esque thing. But after reading some of the biting comments about the recipes from Buddy’s book on Amazon, I felt less guilty for having botched the pâte à choux from his book. I am happy to say that my soft eggy cookies weren’t bad by any means, nor did they go to waste; I sliced them in half, spread Nutella on one half and closed it back up. I swear Nutella can make anything taste delicious….

So today I valiantly decided to give pâte à choux another go and took the recipe for éclairs from The Golden Book of Baking. I was overall very pleased with the results. The only change I made was substituting whipped cream sweetened with confectioner’s sugar and perfumed with a little vanilla extract for the vanilla pastry cream because I didn’t really want to have 5 egg yolks lying around… though I suppose I could have turned them into a nice creme brulée.

Leave a comment with your email address if you want the recipe ❤