Baking Bouchon - Recipe 32: Coconut Lime Eclairs

Mmmm, mmmm, good!  These little buggers are a just a creamy ball of sweet, summery goodness.  I've made eclairs once before... chocolate ones... and they were pretty darn good too.  In fact, I had a small love affair chocolate pastry cream back then.  My love doesn't last though, because I've totally left behind chocolate pastry cream for lime curd.  (Don't worry chocolate pastry cream, my food affections are finicky so I'll be back.)

Since we've made eclairs here before I'm not going to spend too much time talking about the shells.  We need to get to the good stuff... lime curd.   If you need a more detailed reminder, here you go.  Plus, then you can also remind yourself about chocolate pastry cream which will put a smile on your face.


Basically you melt butter, water and salt together, add flour and sugar and cook a bit.  Then you whip it up with a bunch of eggs and pipe it into chunky little logs.

I did a better job piping the shells this time... I learned my lesson from having a bunch of skinny shells last time that I couldn't fill.  For some reason the tops of the eclairs cracked quite a bit this time which I'm pretty sure has to do with the fact that I baked them at too high of a temperature because I neglected to follow the directions that told me to turn the oven down once you put the eclairs in.  Oops.  Oh well, no major damage done.

These particular eclairs have 3 components to them.  They are filled with lime curd, topped with a glaze and rolled in toasted coconut.

Let's start with the curd!  Oh, the curd.  I've made many-a-curd before but this one... oh my!

This curd has silver leaf gelatin in it.  If any of you need to be reminded about my first silver leaf gelatin disaster, read this.  I'm still embarrassed so let's not discuss it ever again. 

Silver leaf gelatin is not silver, just in case you were wondering - silver had to do with the strength of the "gelling" effect of the gelatin.
It comes in sheets and you put it in ice water to soften it so you can start working with it.

The other components of the lime curd are eggs, sugar, lime juice, lime zest and a lot of butter.  Seriously, this recipe has twice as much butter in it than other curd recipes I have made in the past.

First the eggs and sugar get cooked with the lime juice until the mixture thickens up nicely.  At this point it's super tart!

In your average curd recipe, this is the point where you whisk in some butter to soften the tart flavor of the curd and make it a little bit more silky in texture.  This recipe takes that step to a whole other level.

The cooked eggs, sugar and lime juice get strained into a blender.  Then, with the blender running, you add the butter a little bit at a time.  The result is amazing!  You're basically whipping the butter into the curd so it ends up ridiculously fluffy and creamy.  Then you add a little lime zest right at the end to produce those pretty green flecks of color.  I'm definitely throwing away every other curd recipe I have and will make this one exclusively, forever.

Next I needed to whip up the glaze for the top of the eclairs.  This acts as the "glue" to keep the toasted coconut on top.  I totally jacked up the glaze.  The list of ingredients here was not entirely clear.  It read "Pouring/icing fondant".  My internet search turned up a bunch of stuff but I decided that this mean Dry Fondant Powder.  Once I started reading the instructions in the recipe this made absolutely no sense because you are just supposed to add a bit of milk to the Pouring/icing fondant to loosen it up which doesn't exactly apply to powder.  So, I checked out the instructions on back of my bag and made something up with milk, melted butter and the dry fondant.  It worked fine but probably would not have been pretty and shiny on its own.  Good thing it got a coconut disguise. 

Toasted coconut is the last component in these eclairs but this isn't regular coconut.  This is dessicated coconut which is basically unsweetened coconut that is dried and ground into little bits.  I'm sure you could use regular coconut here but the fact that this is unsweetened helps keep the eclairs from being overly sweet.

All right - let's put these little suckers together!!

A pastry bag is used to inject all the fluffy, creamy, limey, buttery goodness of the lime curd inside of the eclairs.

The top of the eclairs then get dipped in the glaze which is warm and gooey.

Then the eclairs get a beautiful topping of toasted coconut.







 The result is a beautiful eclair with an amazing flavor.  The eclair shell is rich, the curd is... well, we've already discussed my feelings on the curd, the glaze and the coconut add some nice texture to the top.  I'm a big fan of these.  I have this body spray that is lime coconut scented and these definitely remind me of that (that's a good thing, I promise) and that reminds me of sunscreen which reminds me of summer and summer makes me smile so, basically, these eclairs make me smile... and want to go to the beach.

I actually made two different eclairs today which caused my love for lime curd to be replaced by another food crush but you have to wait more than a week to hear about the other eclair because I have something very special planned for you all next week.  I won't ruin the surprise by telling you about it but I can tell you that we're going to have a ball!

Love y'all!
Julie