Choux a la Creme

My friend came back from Japan more than a week ago and came over to my place for a baking session. 

It is funny. We were really close friends back in Secondary school but we went to different schools after that and weren't exactly in touch. I can't exactly remember how we got in touch again after leaving school. Thinking back, that was 18 years ago when we first knew each other! No wonder I need to upgrade my face moisturiser to "Repairwear" range!

Somehow we got in touch again in recent years ( I think it's thanks to Facebook!) and somehow baking came into the picture. She is currently enrolled in a culinary school in Japan *envy envy* and seems to be enjoying her classes.

So she came, armed with her recipe from school and we made cream puffs (fancier name: choux a la creme just as they had taught in her school). I had an earlier attempt where I made cream puffs using Pierre Hermes recipe. I did not post the recipe but you can easily search from any Daring Bakers' blog in google.

I do not have my friend's recipe. Even if I do, it is from her school, I do not think it's nice of me to post it. To me, I am not quite able to tell the difference between her school's recipe and Pierre Hermes', yeah my taste buds are that lousy. They both taste good! Light and puffy, just like cream puffs should be.

Other than the puff, what goes inside is just as, if not, even more important. There are places that sell cream puffs with whipped cream and I think that is a lazy shortcut method. I like cream puffs that are only filled with pastry cream. I can accept pastry cream added with whipped cream to lighten it a little, but just not whipped cream alone.

Since I wanted to save my vanilla pods for my little project which is coming up, we used vanilla bean paste for the pastry cream instead. That is a good vanilla bean paste too with all the vanilla seeds in it, but of course, the pod would have been a little more fragrant.

2 weeks are going by in a flash and she will be back in Japan soon. Not sure when we will have the opportunity to bake together again, but the refrigerated cream puffs sure smelt and tasted so good!

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!

Cream puffs

made some cream puffs yesterday, as I feel this is one of the things that use the least preparation time and ingredients.

Plus, it was a chance to use my new Kitchenaid!

This attempt at cream puffs is definitely better in terms of aesthetics, as compared to my previous attempt. Taste wise, it's the same, because it's the same recipe.

first attempt - cream puffs

i did it again! Played in the kitchen, meddling with my stuff on sundays, and attempting to make cream puffs.

well, they probably look like weird alien heads with pointed tips (something I would expect to see from The Pet Shop Boys MTV), but believe me, they taste nicer than they look. I was supposed to squeeze them out using a piping bag onto the baking tray. But halfway through, my piping bag burst. Part of the reason was because it is a cheap one from Cold Storage, and part of the reason was that I did not use the coupler ring correctly (by the way, it was after the whole thing, that I went to the net to read up on piping bags that I discover the correct way to use a coupler ring).

here they are, just out from the oven, enjoying the cool air for a while.

see, ice cream inside!

finally...with some make-up on...