French Fridays with Dorie Vanilla Éclairs

My very pretty mini Eclairs

My first attempt at making pâte à chaux was probably 30 years ago. My neighbor wanted to try making cream puffs. My thoughts were…these have to be quite difficult but, it was a challenge and I always loved a good challenge! We found a recipe and we each made our own batch. To our amazement,, they came out wonderful!! The challenge met…job well done…that's that!! Fast forward about 17 years. My daughter was getting married and we were throwing her a shower. I wanted to do fancy finger foods! Something elegant! I wanted to do a ladies tea! Pretty china, cloth napkins and beautiful food. Out comes my Martha Stewart Hors d'Oeuvers cookbook. Pâte à chaux puffs filled with chicken salad! Oh yes! Just what I was looking for. I made what seemed like hundreds but in actuality were probably about 80 or 90 puffs. As I made them, I was able to freeze them. I took them out of the freezer the day of the shower and filled them with the chicken salad. They were a hit! I decided to keep the "pate a chaux puffs" in my "go to" file. A short time later, I needed a dessert for our dinner club and decided to make profiteroles. Awesome! But, until today, I have never made Eclairs. This weeks FFWD recipe was for Vanilla Eclairs. Dorie gave us a lot of choices with these eclairs. Chocolate filling, vanilla pastry cream or profiteroles, which are filled with ice cream. I chose to make eclairs and profiteroles. I made my eclairs shorter then Dorie suggests. Three inches long gave me a very nice mini eclair. I had never piped pastry before. I think I could have made them a bit fatter. I chose to make a vanilla pastry cream for the filling and finish with a chocolate ganache for the top. Since I plan on using the profiteroles for Easter, I made two for the photos and froze the rest for later. These were delicious and my Easter company will definitely appreciate having these as part of our dessert selection!

I really enjoy making Pâte à chaux and had fun with this recipe…If you need a challenge, give them a try. This recipe came from Dorie Greenspans new cookbook "Around My French Table". If you'd like to have your own copy you can get it here...Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours.

Ingredients for pâte à chaux

Boiling the milk mixture

Flour being stirred in

Ready for the eggs

After the eggs were added

Piped eclairs

Puffs

Vanilla pastry cream 

Pastry cream cooling

Pretty Profiteroles!!

Post script to my blog..as I was hitting the publish post button I accidentally deleted my whole post..I still don't know how I did it but for the second time this morning here we go!!