Eclaires

Originally posted on Facebook March 30, 2009

These were a special request, well more of a strong suggestion, from one of my engineering friends. He's from Mauritius, a small island nation that was once a French colony, so there's a lot of French influence there. I was very nervous making them because I know how tricky cream puff type pastry can be to make. But I figured I'd give it a try. I found an excellent recipe at Allrecipes.com and got to work.

Pastry
1 cup water
1/2 cup butter
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour
4 eggs

Preheat oven to 400. Boil the water in a medium sized pot. Stir in the butter and salt until melted. Add the flour, all at once, stirring vigorously until mixture forms a ball. Remove from heat and stir in eggs, one at a time. Spoon in tablespoons onto cookie sheet (it may be a good idea to cover this in parchment paper) leaving lots of room in between pastries for expansion. Bake at 400 for 15 minutes and then turn heat down to 375 for another 10-15 min, until pastries are golden brown. Leave to cool completely.

Filling
1 package (250 g) cream cheese, softened
2 cups milk
1 package (30 g) instant vanilla pudding mix

Slowly beat 1/2 cup of milk into the cream cheese until creamy. Then beat in the remaining milk and the package of pudding mix. Stir until thick, 1 to 2 minutes. Cut cooled pasty shells in half and spoon pudding mixture in between the halves.

Chocolate Sauce
1 (1 ounce) square of unsweetened chocolate, chopped
1 tablespoon butter
1 cup icing sugar
2 tablespoons hot water

Melt the butter and chocolate together over low heat. Remove from heat and mix in icing sugar and hot water. Drizzle over filled eclaires. Mmmmmm, chocolate, cheesecake, pudding, pastries.....

I'd have to say these are the weirdest thing I've ever tried making. The pastry when it's in the pot smells and looks very odd. And then it gets even weirder when you add the eggs start to put them on the pans. They puff up quite nicely in the oven and smell great when they are finished. They also taste AMAZING when finished. A warning though, the filling part of the recipe makes way more than needed for what the pastry part makes. So I ended up making two batches of pastry and icing. Of course I ran out of icing sugar on the second batch of icing, but it still turned out okay.

My family (mostly, my parents) was commenting about the unnecessary calories they had ingested all weekend so I took these to school and handed them out to whichever engineers were sitting near me in my last class. And the friend I made them for managed to eat five.