Hi! I’m Susie, one of the trainees here at STREAT. Have you ever had a recipe that you’ve attempted to cook but for some reason it just hasn’t worked? Well me too, and I’d like to help by sharing one of my very own recipe disasters. I made chocolate éclairs the other day as part of my hospitality training and it was a disaster!
The hardest part of making chocolate éclairs is the choux pastry. It’s really tricky and if it’s not made correctly the éclairs won’t turn out properly. Here’s the recipe that I used.
Choux Pastry
Ingredients:
250ml water
100g butter
5g caster sugar
Pinch of salt
190g plain flour
6 eggs
Method:
Boil the water with the butter, salt and sugar.
Add the flour all at once and return to the heat to ‘burn off’ the mixture, until it forms a layer at the bottom of the pan, the mixture should form a ball when it’s stirred.
Cool the mixture to 30C to prevent the eggs scrambling when you add them. Once it’s cool enough add the eggs 1 at a time.
The paste doesn’t need to rest, pipe the desired shape and bake at 210C in the centre of the oven. I followed this recipe to the letter, well at least I thought I had…
I did have to add a little extra flour as the mixture was runny and wasn’t piping bag consistency, but the real problem that I had was that the oven temperature was set to 180C instead of 210C. So the Choux pastry that I cooked looked more like flat pancakes rather than nice puffed up pastry!
I also made a crème patisserie (which means pastry cream) for the éclairs. This mix has to be measured out very carefully. If it’s not, then the crème patisserie will either be too sweet or really stiff.
Crème patisserie
Ingredients:
500mls milk
2mls vanilla essence
4 egg yolks
120g sugar
40g corn flour
25g butter
Method:
Heat 400ml of milk with the vanilla essence.
Cream the eggs and sugar together until they become light in colour.
Mix the remainder of the milk with the corn flour, using your fingers as this will remove any lumps.
Add the egg mixture to the milk and whisk thoroughly, then add the cornflour mix.
Bring to the boil, stirring continuously, the mix should start to thicken up immediately, and once it’s at the thickness that you want it, add the butter.
Place the crème patisserie in a bowl and cover with cling wrap (the cling wrap should be sitting on top of your mixture with no air bubbles), this is to prevent a skin forming on the top and place in the fridge until needed.
I’m proud to say that this chocolate éclair recipe was the one that I’ve had the most trouble with, but in saying that it was also fun to make.
I hope that by sharing my recipe disaster I have helped anyone who has had trouble trying to make chocolate éclairs, and for those who might not have had a go at making them, give them a go – you might enjoy it!
I’d love to hear about your own recipe disasters, so if you have any let us know, and I’ll see if I can help you work out what went wrong!
Cheers, and I’m really looking forward to helping you out with your recipes.
Susie.
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