In their own words

A spot in the city I identify with is Hanover, Southbank. I stayed there a few years ago. A life changing experience as I learned anyone, at any point in time can fall from grace.

Chloe.

Photo by Lisa Sorgini.

Wren's life lessons are shared with you through a series of illustrations. You can check these out on our digital story telling platform Home STREAT Home.

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.

I have always had a passion for cooking, but I didn’t know where to start. From my earliest memories every Christmas my aunt would get me to help her to cook all of the yummy treats that we used to have like mince tarts and short bread cookies.

I left high school when I was 16. I didn’t like being there, and I thought that I could be doing better things with my time rather than being stuck in a classroom. So I disengaged myself from my family and from anyone else that I thought was going to try and tell me to go back to school and complete my high school education. I instead spent a lot of my time hanging around with my friends, doing nothing in particular.

All the while, I still had my strong passion for cooking. I successfully applied to TAFE to try to complete a hospitality course. I thought that I was in the right frame of mind to try this, but I was wrong, and I ended up dropping out of the course. A few months later I went back to TAFE and tried again. But again, I couldn’t complete the course and I left.

A few months after I left my TAFE course I was at Frontyard. I was doing an art class called Evolution and I kept saying that I could do a better job at supplying the lunches. This was because in my opinion and the opinion of everyone else who was there, that the muffins weren’t cooked properly and I kept banging on about it! So the worker who had gotten me into the Evolution course, then referred me to a place called STREAT.

A couple of weeks later I had my first interviews and I was put through to the next round. Once the second interview was complete I was then told I had been accepted into the program. I was so excited!

So that’s how I came to be in the STREAT program and I’ve enjoyed every minute that I’ve been here, particularly in the kitchen and on the carts as well. So far it’s been a lot of fun, but it’s also been a lot of hard work, and this time around I’m not going anywhere!