Cream Puffs with Chocolate Pastry Cream

What does going to Pantry Magic mean to you? For me, it's feels exactly like a 5-year old kid going to Toys R' Us, there is so much to play with! And going in also means spend, spend and spend. I see the colourful silicone baking tools and colourful melamine mixing bowls and just drool. What's the fascination over pots, pans, baking trays..which I have and see everyday? I don't know. The grass is always greener on the other side. I am a big sucker for nice (and sometimes expensive) kitchen stuff. Even if it means not owning them, I have to look at them. I can go to a department store and look at the expensive pots, knives, crockery for the umpteenth time and not get tired of them. But I told myself I do not need a sixty bucks mixing bowl. Therefore, todays's trip to Pantry Magic was a highly disciplined one. I went in without a shopping list, which was very dangerous, but I managed to spend only a little.

I was in high spirits, and still am. My mind is still at my niece's birthday party over the weekend. I reckoned that during parties, anything bite-sized moves the fastest ( at least I personally would rather grab bite-sized food than hold a plate all the time). Moreover, she already had a birthday cake so I decided to make some bite-sized cream puffs filled with chocolate pastry cream.

I had initially wanted to make eclairs. Well, the pâte à choux is the same anyway. But somehow, when I made them into eclairs, the centers did not dry out 100% and my piping skills sucked. They did not look as nice as I wanted them to be. So I made a second batch of the pastry dough and made them into small cream puffs, or also called profiteroles.

The pastry dough was easy peasy. Initially, the instructions for the pastry cream did not go well into this little scatterbrain of mine. I had to read it over and over and over again and all I got was "pour into here...and then pour into there...and then pour in here again...". But once I got into doing it, I wasn't that scatterbrain after all.

The recipe that I used was not the same as I had used in my first attempt. This time, both the pastry and cream recipes are from Pierre Hermé, one of the most famous pastry chefs in the world. It was one of the Daring Bakers' challenges (which I have been dropped as a member since I did not follow their baking schedule), you can do a google search and find it on the blogs of numerous Daring Bakers. I did some slight tweaks on the recipes to suit my guests' palate and my oven's cooking time. I also did not do the chocolate glaze as the Daring Bakers, I used my own recipe and squeezed them out of a squeeze bottle.

Two people found the pastry cream a little too sweet, the others all said they were delicious! They also look a lot better than my first two attempts on cream puffs. This recipe is a keeper!