You don’t have to be a pastry chef and you don’t even have to have all the fancy tools to make something delicious to shove in your face. These are some pretty rag tag looking eclairs, but they tasted great! And if you happen to have a pastry bag, I’m sure you could make some prettier ones.
This recipe will make about 16 smallish eclairs. For four people, I cut the recipe in half and we each ate two, because that’s the way we roll. One wasn’t enough. Two was getting a little hard to get down by the last couple of bites. But we’re troopers, to we persevered!
These suckers will get soggy sitting around, so make the pastry and cream filling ahead of time, then a bit before your guests arrive (assuming you’re not planning on eating all of these yourself, but if you are, I’m not judging)….put them together and stick in the fridge.
PASTRY:
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup milk
8 Tablespoons salted butter
1 teaspoon sugar
1 cup flour
4 eggs
Preheat your oven to 425 degrees and get out a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a silicone mat.
Dump everything except for the flour and eggs into a saucepan and bring it to a boil over medium heat. Remove from the heat and quickly stir in the flour all at once. (You’ll need something stiff, like a wooden spoon. I have one that’s flat on the bottom, which works great.) Put what is now a ball of dough back on the heat, and continue cooking and stirring constantly for two minutes.
Dump your dough ball into a mixing bowl and beat in the eggs, one at a time. Let each one get fully mixed in before you add the next egg. Beat until the dough is smooth and forms thich ribbons when pulled up.
Put your dough into a pastry bag with a 1/2″ tip. If your don’t have a pastry bag, use a good old plastic bag. Turn the top part of the bag to the outside, so it isn’t so tall. Set the bag into a bowl to hold it while you dump in the dough.
Now just fold the sides back up, twist the top closed, snip off a bottom corner, and squeeze the dough out onto your baking sheet. You’ll want ribbons that are about an inch in diameter and four inches long. Chances are, they won’t look too perfect, particularly if you don’t have a pastry bag. Not to worry. You can use a knife or your finger to coax them into shape.
Those are pretty messy, right? But after they bake, they look much better. Bake at 425 degrees for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 325 degrees and bake another 20-30 minutes. Don’t open the oven until they’re done! Just squint at them though the little oven door. Bake until they’re really brown. If you don’t bake them long enough, they’ll collapse as they cool.
FILLING:
2 cups milk
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup corn starch
4 egg yolks
4 Tablespoons salted butter
2 teaspoons vanilla
In a bowl, beat the sugar, corn starch and egg yolks until they’re creamy and light. It starts out grainy and clumpy, but it will smooth out if you keep beating, trust me.
In a saucepan, heat the milk until it just starts boiling, stirring to keep a skin from forming.
Gradually add the hot milk to the egg mixture while beating, to temper the eggs. Pour the mixture back into the saucepan and whisk while you bring it to a boil. Boil about 30 seconds until your pastry cream is nice and thick.
Pour the pastry cream into a bowl and press some plastic wrap down lightly on the top to keep it from forming a skin as it cools. (Or you can use a plastic bag if you’re out of plastic wrap like me.) Let it cool on the counter, then put in the fridge to get cold.
Before dinner, you can put the cream filling into a pastry bag, and fill your eclairs by squirting some filling in two of three places from the bottom side. Personally, I don’t much like to do that, since I can’t see how much filling is going in. I just cut them in half, and spoon the filling in, then each eclair gets the same amount of evenly distributed filling.
GLAZE:
1 cup chocolate chips
4 Tablespoons butter
2 Tablespoons corn syrup.
Melt together using a double boiler, or nuke it in the microwave for 30 seconds at a time, stirring well between each time to give the chocolate a chance to melt without burning. Then just slap the lids on your eclairs and brush or spoon on some glaze. Stick back in the fridge to set the chocolate and keep them cold until dessert time. Eat all you can, because they get soggy and won’t keep well. That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking with it.