Moving On

OK, I need to get past this. You see, I've been haunted for the last...wow, almost three months now, by these eclairs! They just never turned out the way I wanted them too, and I've just been too discouraged to talk about them.

It's not that they were bad, mind. They just weren't what I expected them to be. But I watched some Julia Child a couple of weeks ago and one of the things she said was (to paraphrase), "Never apologize; just because it disappoints you doesn't mean the people you're serving know that it's not the way you intended it to be." In effect, keep your mouth shut and everyone will probably think it's just fine. Well, that surely is what happened with these eclairs. My friends thought they were just dandy. Bless them.

But to bring myself to closure here, let me explain what disappointed me. I made the choux paste, and it was fine. For all the kerfluffle out there about how tricky cream puffs are, they're not. You make the batter (you can even do it in a food processor) and steam does all the work for you (which is why I picked this particular dessert for this supper club--the theme was "air" and I felt that a pastry in which the "air" technically did all the work was right in line).

So, crisp little fingers of puffy buttery dough, the creamy custardy filling. No problem, right? Wrong. The directions for these eclairs call for lightening the filling with whipping cream. Nice idea, but guess what? You can't pipe it. If you look inside a cream puff or gougere, you'll see that the steam has indeed fluffed everything up nicely, but it leaves this sort of spider webby network of dough that you have to force aside to while you're filling them. That light airy cream just didn't have enough muscle for the job.

As a result, I was forced to slit the eclairs down the side and plop the filling in. Worst thing in the world? Of course not. Actually the way the instructions described the filling process? Why, yes. Not in line with my personal expectations? Ah, no, and this is where we come to the crux of the problem, and the aforementioned haunting.

It's not that they turned out badly, or even that they turned out differently than the recipe described, it's that they did not meet my expectations, and because I let myself down, I labeled them a flop. Of course I didn't stop cooking after this, I just stopped talking about it here. I was too mortified by my own perceived failure to come back and discuss it.

So now I am back, and I have discussed it. I didn't mention that the chocolate glaze let me down too, in part because I waited too late to make it and it didn't harden up the way it was supposed to until the next day. Again, my fault. If I'd made the chocolate in the morning, it would probably have been fine by 5 p.m. or so, when I needed to use it.

Well, live and learn. I think I have some pictures of this mortifying experience somewhere.

Right, you see? Fine. They're fine. The picture is a little heavy on glare for my taste, but I didn't edit it at all, just dropped it in here.

Now that we're past that, I'll start working on some other things that won't disappoint. I'm not even going to bother giving you the recipe for the eclairs, I'm so annoyed at how I let them ruin my life for three months. They are dead to me. Let's move on!

Chocolate Eclairs in Real Time

We have a quarterly supper club that meets tonight. Our theme for this meal is "air." All the components have to have some relation to air. That relationship can be as vague or as specific as desired (and if someone says, "I'm serving rack of lamb, because lambs breathe air," I won't be the least bit upset). The hostess provides the entree, and the other three couples provide an appetizer, sides, and dessert. We rotate who does what, and tonight I'm to provide dessert.

I cast aside the obvious "air" references in dessert--meringue because it looks like the clouds, souffles because they're airy. Instead I chose chocolate eclairs--the heated air is what causes the choux pastry to puff. Choux pasty is so easy to make, it's a shame people don't make it more often.

I decided to do this recipe in stages. That way, if any one step failed, I could chuck the whole thing in the garbage and go buy a pavlova or some Miss Meringe cookies at the grocery store. So I thought I'd share this as I made it.

Step one is the pastry cream, because it needs to cool for at least an hour, and it was the most intimidating piece to me. I've made choux pastry many times, but I can't recall ever having made pastry cream. Anything where I'm heating up raw eggs or yolks to the point where they could potentially scramble makes me a little uneasy.

And truth be told, I think I did scramble it a little, but at the end of the recipe the pastry cream gets folded into whipped cream, so I think the stirring I'll be giving it prior to the folding will take care of any little lumps.

But here's the result of my efforts:

Not bad. This spoonful went right in my mouth, of course, and I can report that it has a nice vanilla flavor. It looks like vanilla pudding, and I guess that's pretty much what it tastes like (indeed, pretty much what it is). But I'm pleased that it turned out and I don't, at this point, at least, have to make a grocery run.

Vanilla Pastry Cream
Enough for 12 – 13 éclairs
From Fine Cooking magazine

1 cup whole milk (I was out of whole—I used ½ and ½)
3 large egg yolks
¼ cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/8 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Warm the milk in a medium saucepan over medium heat until tiny bubbles appear around the edges. In a medium bowl, combine egg yolks, sugar, and salt. Whisk to combine. Add the cornstarch and salt and whisk. Pour half of the hot milk into the egg yolk mixture and whisk well. Add remaining hot milk and whisk again. Return the milk mixture to the saucepan and cook over medium heat, whisking constantly. Continue cooking until mixture thickens to the consistency of vanilla pudding. This will happen all of a sudden. One minute you’ll be whisking milk, the next minute you’ll look up to see how hard it’s raining and when you look down, you’ll have pudding. It may look lumpy as it starts to thicken, but it will smooth out.

Remove from the heat, and scrape into a clean bowl. Whisk in the vanilla, and cover with a sheet of plastic wrap directly on the surface of the pastry cream. Refrigerate until chilled, at least an hour.

Next up: the dough and the ganache, but not until this afternoon.