Alas my post is late, but I went through all this work so I’m DARN well sharing it with everybody!

Alright, so – Pate a Choux, anyone?

Kat of The Bobwhites was our August 2012 Daring Baker hostess who inspired us to have fun in creating pate a choux shapes, filled with crème patisserie or Chantilly cream. We were encouraged to create swans or any shape we wanted and to go crazy with filling flavors allowing our creativity to go wild!

This was a recipe I got really excited about; my brother had been bothering me to try pate a choux for a long time.  “It’s so easy”, he told me a million times.

And he wasn’t wrong.  Not exactly.

Pate a choux isn’t terribly difficult; the ingredients cheap, the process is straight-forward; the most difficult part was my arms getting tired from beating in the eggs!  At least, on the surface those are the most difficult parts.

The issues I ran into were unfortunately far more granular; while it’s easy to melt butter and stir in flour and eggs, using the right technique and getting a feel for the correct batter (dough?) consistency is something else entirely.  For example, the picture above was my second attempt at creme puffs.  Check out my first attempt below:

Notice anything different? 😀

My first attempt at pate a choux gave me a pretty runny batter which resulted in astoundingly dome-like puffs.  Having never made these before I wasn’t really sure if that was “correct”,  but I quickly determined that there was no way these could be accurate – they were hollow and pale, and generally just not that nice to look at.  So I did some research and tried again.

The bottom line was that I hadn’t let the batter dry out enough before adding the eggs in, hence its soupy-ness.  I tried again, and the second time had a much thicker, happier batter that yielded nice puffy puffs.

Now, puffy puffs are all well and good, but outside of their visual appeal there wasn’t really much good to say about them.  I don’t know about anyone else who’s made pate a choux before, but my choux always smelled distinctly of egg.  Not only that, but their taste wasn’t particularly appetizing either, even with filling!  I feel like I was doing something wrong.  Did anyone else have flavor issues?  I’d love some tutelage.

Basically, this was a really cool challenge in which I learned a lot, but I don’t feel like I’ve actually mastered these yet.  Notice I didn’t even make swans like we were encouraged to – I spent enough time trying to get the recipe right!  At any rate, when I get some help I’ll probably go a second round of making these to see if I can improve.  Stay tuned!

Also, “Chantilly cream” is the best sounding filling, ever.

Pate a Choux

Find the recipe here!