Baking Bouchon - Recipe 20: Chocolate Eclairs

I just asked CA if Eclairs are a breakfast food or a dessert.  He says they can be either.  I think they're breakfast because we need more reasons to have chocolate for breakfast.

There are a ton of ingredients in this recipe!  But to be fair, it's really three recipes... Pâte â Choux, Chocolate Pastry Cream and Chocolate Glaze.
 

First came the chocolate pastry cream.  This stuff is out of control.  It's ten times better than the regular pastry cream I made for the cream puffs, it's as good as crack (from what I hear) and it's better than... well, it's good people.  Really freakin' good.

The pastry cream starts out with egg yolks and sugar which you beat together.  To that you add custard powder and cocoa powder.  Luckily the chocolates in this version of pastry cream keep it from turning yellow from the custard powder like the non-chocolate version did.  I've never really been a fan of neon food... brown food is perfectly acceptable.

To the egg/sugar/custard/cocoa mixture you add milk and that all gets cooked until it's nice and thick.  Like pudding.

That stuff gets strained and in goes butter and melted chocolate.  I used the really good chocolate here and am so glad I did.

That all gets chilled overnight and it thickens up even more as it chills.

I've been eating this stuff like it's my job and yes, I have a little bit of a stomach ache, and no, I don't regret it one little bit.

Next came the Pâte â Choux which is made just like the dough for cream puffs... water, butter and salt gets melted together.  To that you add flour and sugar and cook until it forms a nice ball.

That all gets transferred to the mixer and blended together with a lot of eggs, transferred to a piping bag and set in the fridge to chill.

Here's where I made an error.   I didn't do a very good job reading the instructions on what size tip to use on the piping bag to pipe the eclairs on the baking sheet so they were WAY too skinny.  CA said they look like churros.  He's right. 

In my defense, I used the biggest tip I had and I really thought they would puff out more than they did.

I tried my very best to find a way to fill these skinny little guys with pastry cream (I poked a skewer through them and sliced the in half) but it just didn't work. 

Luckily I had some dough leftover and just cut the tip of the piping bag and piped big flat eclairs and that worked just fine.  Since I only had a few eclairs to fill with the pastry cream, I had a bunch of chocolate pastry cream leftover.  I couldn't possibly eat any more of it and if it stayed in my fridge any longer that's exactly what was going to happen.  Luckily, I had some unfilled cream puffs leftover in the freezer so I thawed those and filled them with the leftover chocolate pastry cream.  Best idea ever!

The last step was to make the chocolate glaze.  I did not use the glaze recipe from this cookbook because it called for something called "neutral glaze" which I didn't have, couldn't find in the store and refused to order off the Internet.  

So, I used this recipe for chocolate doughnut glaze from Alton Brown.  It worked perfectly and didn't require me to buy random crap I'll never use again.

Each eclair and puff got dipped in the glaze as did the churros (which, even without the pastry cream are pretty darn tasty). 



See my laptop?  90% of the time I'm cooking this is how it's happening as I read a recipe off the Internet.  My poor laptop gets pretty crusty with splashes and spills. 
 

Here they are!  Shiny, chocolaty eclairs.  Not only are they pretty, they're delicious.  The pâte â choux is nice and crispy on the outside and moist on the inside.  The pastry cream is crazy good and has a nice bitter chocolate flavor (not too sweet).  The glaze is shiny, sweet and dried very nicely on top.  All things considered, these were quite successful.

Hooray for chocolate!  Hooray for the fact that CA is taking these to work tomorrow because having them anywhere near me is dangerous.

Julie