Decorated cream puffs

In the weekend I was watching the drama Absolute Boyfriend. (Which is a really awesome drama by the way ) In the drama there was a girl who was making cream puffs. They looked delicious but I had no idea what cream puffs were, until I Googled it.

Turns out that cream puffs are the same as the Dutch “slagroomsoesjes”, although the Dutch ones are frozen. I don’t really like slagroomsoesjes but the cream puffs seemed worth making, so I Googled for some recipe of cream puffs and they all said it was really easy to make, which is actually really good cause I cannot cook at all

I thought it was going to be a disaster but it was fun making and I thought of sharing it with you since I haven’t blogged in a while. The ‘normal’ cream puffs look a bit too plain so I made my own topping, consisting of melted chocolate and sugar decorations.

I decided to put up my own recipe, which is really just a combination of the 1,000+ recipes I read on the internet, and my own idea. Not one recipe seemed to mind telling me for how much people the ingredients were. :S

The Recipe
For around 12 – 14 cream puffs

Ingredients for the puffs/shells:

• 200 Grams/7 oz of milk (around 200 ml)
• 80 Grams/2.8 oz of butter
• 140 grams/4.9 oz of flour
• 4 Regular sized eggs
• 2 Tea spoons of sugar
• Half a spoon of salt

For the filling you can either use custard or crème pâtissière (what a burden to type). I wanted to use custard but it went awfully wrong so I used crème pâtissière instead. It was easier to make and it tasted pretty nice

Ingredients for the crème pâtissière/filling:

• 550 Grams/17.5 oz of milk (around 550ml)
• 33 Grams/ 1.164 oz of butter
• 110 Grams/3.88 oz of sugar
• 2 Regular sized eggs
• 44 Grams/1.552 oz of flour
• Vanilla Essence

Ingredients for the topping (additional):

• 2 chocolate bars (just any kind, I’ll stick to milk)
• Sugar shapes/decorations (I used Fiddes Payne’s Pretty ‘n Pink, available in the UK as well, don’t know about others though)
• Icing sugar (optional)

First we are going to take 4 eggs and put them in a bowl. It’s important to have the eggs at room temperature cause or else it will be hard to make a smooth clump of dough later. Mix them thoroughly.

Cut 80 grams of butter into very small pieces, mix them together in a pan with the milk, sugar and salt. Place the pan on a fire and make sure it is boiling. It has to boil rapidly so the fat from the butter will not float on top.

Sieve the flour once and when the butter has completely been melted, you can add the sieved flour. Make sure to add all the flour in one time otherwise the dough will get clumpy. Keep on mixing until a white coating starts to appear on the bottom of the pan. For the mixing you can either use a spoon, spatula or a mixer (not electrical). I used all three of them, but a spatula made out of wood is the best in my opinion.

Add the egg mixture in small parts to the dough. After adding a little of the egg mixture mix it again until the egg mixture has completely disappeared into the dough. You should not see any visible mixture anymore. Now add the other parts as well, but still separately.

The dough will be ready when it’s thick, smooth and soft. It shouldn’t bee thin and when you stir it with your spatula it should stick a little but it should still be trying to fall down.
Preheat the oven at 200 degrees Celsius, which is around 390 degrees Fahrenheit.

Once taken out, get your pastry bag and put all the dough in it. If you don’t have any, you can use a spoon instead. Put round figures of dough on the baking paper, they should have diameter around 4 centimetres (1 and a half inch). Make sure you don’t put them too close together, cause they will rise not only in height but also in width.

When the oven is done preheating, put the dough in and bake it until they turn light brown. Then lower the heat from 200/390 degrees to 170 degrees Celsius/340 degrees Fahrenheit. Continue baking for this for around 20 minutes. But be careful watching them, you don’t want them to turn too brown. If you think they turning too dark, just stop baking it.

Now we’re about to make the crème pâtissière. You can also use custard instead. Get two eggs and put 3/4th of the sugar into a bowl and mix it together with the eggs. Add the flour and mix it again.

Add the rest of the sugar (1/4) with the butter to the milk. Make it boil and pour half of the hot milk into the bowl with the egg/sugar mixture. Mix it and then return it back into the pan. Keep heating until the mixture boils and gets thick. You’re don when you see big bubbles coming out of the mixture. Add some vanilla essence, and please don’t be too greedy with the essence. I used quite a lot of it but I think I should’ve used more.

Next thing we’re going to do is to poke a hole on the top of the puff. You can do this either with a fork or the tip of the pastry bag. Now get your pastry bag and gently squeeze the crème pâtissière into the puff. You’ll notice when it’s full, it’s going to come out.

If you don’t have a pastry bag, like me, there’s another option. The thing you can do for filling the puff is simply cutting one part of the puff and fill the puff with a small spoon. Then you can put the rest on top of it. You can also improvise (YouTube, Google) to make your own pastry bag.

Now get a pan filled with hot/warm water and put it on the stove. Don’t let it boil. Grab a plastic bag and put the chocolate in it. Let the bag with chocolate float into the hot water until the chocolate has completely melted. Make the sugar shapes ready (like putting them in a little bowl, so you can grab them easily).

When the chocolate is completely melted, grab some scissors and cut a little triangle out of one of the bottom corners of the plastic bag. Squeeze the bag empty over all the cream puffs. It’s better to add the chocolate separately in the plastic bag, cause it will cool down very fast.

You can also melt the chocolate au bain-marie, or in the microwave. The method I used is NOT the most effective one but it’s the easiest. However, you’ll loose a pretty big amount of chocolate using my method.

Rapidly put some sugar shapes on the hot chocolate. Don’t forget to do this quickly since the chocolate will melt very fast.

And now you’re done! Have fun eating

Wow, I didn’t realise the entry would be this long… Anyways, I am back, haha. (Special thanks to Keiko from pastry-master.com for the cream puffs)