What a Cream Puff

Sometimes, you go all out. 

We made desserts for a party a couple of weeks ago, and the profiteroles were a real treat.  What could be better than a pastry filled with cream and dunked in chocolate, really?  I've only made them a couple of times before with recipes from the Pie and Pastry Bible.  No single step in the process is difficult...but oh the time!  It's no wonder we don't have these every weekend.

The dough for the cream puffs is a simple flour-based mixture, cooked in a saucepan for just a few minutes.  Then you scoop it into an icing bag and pipe little blobs on a cookie sheet.  The kids had a great time learning to use the bag - it's as if all that training with play-dough was just to prepare them for this. 

The little blobs magically transform into little puffs in the oven, and after they've cooked a short time, you turn the oven off and they dry out while you head to the pool for a swim.

Delightful little hollow things! 

While we turned them over and made the holes, my son and I had a lengthy discussion of what a cream puff was, literally and in the pushover sense.  The pastry bag is then refilled with pastry cream (also easy to make stovetop, the day before) and a squirt of cream goes in the hole in the bottom of each puff. 

The choclate glaze in the cookbook was as easy as can be - microwaved cream over chocolate chips left to set until they melt.  Each puff was dipped in the choclate sauce and nestled on the platter.

You can see them in the back:

The recipe says they're best if eaten within three hours of being filled, so they were the last thing we made.  We have yet to know what they taste like past their three-hour-birthday, however.

Perfection in a puff.