Chocolate Eclairs and Pink Cream Puffs in Se7en Steps…

Let’s just say any recipe that involves chocolate and cream is a winner for me. Eclairs always look so impressive that folk often don’t want to try and make them. But, trust me, the steps are easy. Anybody can whip cream, anybody can melt and dribble chocolate so you only need to know how to make choux pastry, which sounds wonderfully difficult but is really easy.

Last week we did two Valentine posts, one on Valentine crafts that kids can do and one on a Valentines Party… The Valentines Party had se7en hearty foods to to choose from and one of them was pink cream puffs.

This week it was the turn of Hood #2, to demonstrate. So, let’s stop chatting and get down to it. In this recipe we will show traditional chocolate eclairs and how you can turn them into pink cream puffs – really easy as pie!

Meet The Players:

• For the Choux pastry:

  

  • 300ml cold water
  • 2 teaspoons castor sugar
  • 100g butter
  • 120g cake flour
  • 4 eggs (We suddenly decided to double up – so there are only two in the picture – trust me, you really need four eggs for this recipe).
• For the cream filling:

  

• And for your icing:

  

• Either good quality chocolate,
• or a lump of butter, icing sugar, a dash of boiling water and food coloring.

Let’s Play The Game:

Step 1: Place water, sugar and butter in a pot.

Step 2: Pop the pot onto a gentle heat and and melt the butter. As soon as the butter is melted turn up the heat and let the mixture boil.

Step 3: As soon as the mixture boils take it off the heat and toss all the flour in at once.

And stir, stir, stir…

Step 4: Beat your eggs together gently in a separate bowl.

Then add a little bit of egg to your mixture and stir it in completely, repeat until all our egg is included and you have a lovely soft ball of pastry.

Step 5: Pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees Celsius. Spoon your pastry onto your greased trays. At this stage you can choose how big you would like your puffs/eclairs to be… and place them on the tray with plenty of space around them because they will puff up. It’s not just a name for no reason!

Bake for about 20 minutes until they are puffy and starting to brown.

Pop them out of the oven and leave them to cool on a rack. Don’t worry if a couple sag when they cool you are going to fatten them up with cream in the next step.

Step 6: The Filling: Whisk up your cream. (Note to mother person: keep an eye on the cream because some people might be a little obsessed with machinery and end up beating the cream to death!!!).

Place a tiny slit in the side of each puff.

And jam them with cream, no amount is too much here!

Step 7: Finally the topping…

• For the chocolate topping: Melt your chocolate and dribble over your eclairs.

  

  And yum, yum, you are done!

  

• And for the pink icing: Place icing sugar in a bowl with the butter. Melt the butter, in the icing sugar, in the microwave, add a little dash of boiling water. Stir it well. You should have a smooth pourable mixture. If you don’t add a bit more icing sugar or a drop of water, whichever you need. Add a tiny bit of food coloring, a little goes a long way!

  

  Drizzle the icing over your cream puffs.

  

  And yum, yum you are done! Again!

  

This recipe is very easy to double or half, but these are so great that I always make as many as will fit on my baking sheets – it is not like they won’t get eaten!

Hope you have fun – because these are great.