Pate a choux is one of the staple recipes in classic French pastries. In the United States, people most closely associate this dough with cream puffs and eclairs but it makes many other beautiful desserts as well. The word choux means cabbage in French and small cream puffs do look like little cabbages when you use a bit of imagination! The recipe for the basic dough is included here. Find links to finishing techniques and alternatives below. Enjoy!
Cream Puffs
Cream puffs – how delicious when properly prepared! Follow the directions below and produce glorious puffs that will get you rave reviews!
Pastry Cream
Pastry cream is indispensable in the pastry kitchen — it can be used to fill puffs, eclairs, used as a filling in cakes and tarts, and be transformed into creme mousseline or creme chibouste. Make sure you have everything ready and set your work station up properly and you will produce perfect pastry cream every time!
Ganache For Cream Puffs, Eclairs, and Piping
Ganache is a wonderful mixture of chocolate and cream and comes in many different textures and tastes depending on the chocolate and how much cream is added.
This is a basic ganache in the ratio of 1 to 1. This means 1 part chocolate to 1 part heavy cream by weight (just one more reason to buy that scale!) For example, 1 pound of chocolate is mixed with a pint of heavy cream. So if you have only 10 cream puffs to glaze, just mix 2 ounces of chocolate and 2 ounces of cream. Easy!
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Stocking A Baking Station: Ingredients
If you have decided to bake on a regular basis to improve your skills, (and I hope you have!), stocking a baking station is essential so that you have all the basics you will need. That is not to say you will have every possible ingredient or tool, but there are certain items that appear over and over and having them on hand will make your baking much easier.
New England Yeast Rolls
There is nothing quite like the smell of warm bread just out of the oven and these New England yeast rolls are no exception. Make these and your whole house will smell like a bakery — they are buttery, yeasty, and absolutely delicious.
Linzer Cookies
Linzer cookies are lovely, elegant cookies that look harder to make than they actually are — and they’re delicious! I’m a traditionalist so I make these cookies with toasted hazelnuts, but almonds are also delicious.
Books I Love
After 2 decades of professional baking and a lifetime of cooking, I have accumulated a lot of cookbooks! I have cookbooks from every region of the world, both savory and sweet, and countless books on chocolate, cake decorating, and bread baking. I want to share with you my favorites – the books that I turn to time and time again not only because I use them as a professional reference but because they have wonderful recipes that I enjoy making and tips that actually work! Here are 10 books that I would not want to be without as a baker.
Gluten Free Cheese and Herb Crackers
These crackers are buttery, delicious, and best of all, gluten free. Coconut flour and cheese gives these crackers their structure. Include them on your next hor’s doeuvre tray and they are guaranteed to disappear!
Scones You’ll Want to Eat!
Picking the very first recipe is troublesome. Should I make a big splash and do something over the top? Should I pick a tried and true favorite? What about starting with the basics? I finally settled on an often maligned pastry, and many times with good reason — scones. When they are good they can be sublime but quite often they are, well, just not. I have tasted many — dry, crumbly, tasteless scones and wondered, why?! It’s not a time consuming project nor do scones require special equipment or odd ingredients. They simply need the proper ratio of ingredients and a light touch.