'Not as Terrible as I Thought They'd Be' Eclairs

Chocolate eclairs, like macarons, are one of those things that you see behind a polished well-lit glass case in a posh bakery and think, 'Oh yeahhhhhhhh'. Done properly, the pastry is light but sturdy, the cream sweet but not nauseating, the chocolate suggestive. Done poorly, the pastry is soggy, the cream tastes like artificial vanilla or, worse yet, nothing at all, and the chocolate is chocolate-flavored 'topping', drenching the entire thing in a sticky plastic wrap.

Here's what I did - https://www.gretchensbakery.com/chocolate-eclairs-recipe/

I'd long heard the horror stories of making a respectable pate a choux, a cooked dough that must be the exact right consistency for piping, yet rise to be airy and hollow. And guess what - the dough was the freaking easiest part. No joke, I followed the instructions exactly for once, determined that a final fourth egg was NOT needed (this is the only tricky part), and voila!
I've made a lot of dough, so I could tell by look and touch that this dough was perfect. Another egg would've potentially made it too sticky. I didn't want sticky.

Piping is one of those 'practice makes better' things, and something else I usually try to avoid. Since I'm impatient and tend to rush or be tired when I get to this stage I don't do it well, but I can definitely tell that the more I am forced to do it, the better I get.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, because even in the recipe picture the eclairs look pretty small, but in my head these things were going to rise and expand and be the same size as the ones in local donut shops. They did NOT do that. They rose a little, and passed all the tests with knocking them about and sounding hollow and the like, but they stayed very small. This pissed me off at first (who wants a tiny eclair?!), but then I ate one and realized if it was any bigger I'd die, so this size was great. I can't remember the piping tip size I used, but it was, uh, the size of these things.

Pastry cream is another thing that I'd been all worked up about making, but it turns out it's just basically a pudding or custard, and I've made a ton of that, so again, no big deal. I got super bougie and even used an actual real vanilla bean pod, can you EVEN?! One of my biggest pet beeves about cream puffs and napoleons is the quality of the cream; some places cheap out and just use whipping cream (non-dairy 'product'), or use substandard ingredients, and you can just TASTE the cheap.
Just remember with boiled milk recipes to stir, stir, stir. You don't want to scorch it. That's really as hard as it gets here. Oh, and the tempering. Tempering means 'introducing the hot stuff to the cold stuff instead of the other way around so that you don't end up with scrambled eggs'.

You will be able to tell by the consistency when this is ready. It was super easy for me; mine pretty much thickened up as soon as I

added the eggs back in, it was like, 'BAM'! Oh, and I didn't do any of those fussy things the recipe said to do like straining. I don't mind some little flecks or whatever, and as long as you're careful and don't have chunks, you should be fine.

I am going to pause here to push one of my favorite members of my salt collection, my vanilla salt. Please ignore the 'Best Before' date; I treat many dates such as this as recommendations rather than rules, and as long as they pass the sniff/taste test, I tend to be a little flexible with expired products. Especially ones that I can only get online, and now that I'm back in Canada are a massive pain/expense to get shipped to me. Vanilla salt is a wonderful thing for desserts; one of the worst mistakes you can make is leave it out (even a fleck or two helps!), because not only does the salt enhance the sweet, it keeps things like pastry cream from being totally bland. No one wants bland. Unless it's blancmange, which I've never actually eaten, but in my head whenever I see it in a book I think, 'ugh, bland'.

So while my pastry shells were baking and cooling, I made the pastry cream, and then set that to cooling while I laboriously poked holes in the shells. Filling these things was a PAIN. I did two separate pans, one with an egg glaze and one without, and I can't remember which one was worse to fill but I think it was the egg glazed batch. It was like the wash became a protective barrier and made it super hard to not only hack into them, but to also get a non-tipped pastry bag in there. Because most of the time I just totally skip the pastry tips and connectors and all that stuff, it's just something else for me to wash and lose and have to buy over and over. The majority of them I filled as per the instructions; I cut a couple little 'X's'. If I couldn't do this, I split them down the middle horizontally. It's not like I was putting these in a display case to sell, so who cares. If you're wondering how I got the tops all smooth, YES I LICK MY FINGERS CONSTANTLY. Don't tell my friend Shannon, she's a germaphobe and she'd freak out. I'm pretty sure all my family members, who make up most of my test subjects, are aware of my terrible habits and just assume I'm doing all kinds of questionable things. I mean, they've SEEN my kitchen.

LOOK HOW GORGEOUS!!! I'm still bad with ganache so I did some weird things to get it the thickness I wanted. They tasted JUST FINE.

I don't normally reach for sweets, but I reached for some of these. More than once.