All that matters is how it tastes. Words to live by when you’re just a lowly home cook. I think I’m doing good if what I cook doesn’t end up as the dog’s dinner. Truth be told, I once made something so horrible the cat wouldn’t eat it.
The other night I was watching little kids making eclairs on Master Chef Junior. It dawned on me it had been a really long time since I made eclairs. The kids were coming for dinner, so I thought it would be nice to have something different for dessert.
You’re supposed to have a pastry bag to exqueez the pastry dough onto your baking sheet so they’re pretty and uniform. I couldn’t find my pastry bag. Pretty hard to keep tabs on something you use so seldom, but I think it’s possible I threw it out.
An industrious mouse chewed through our dryer vent, through the dryer hose, through an interior wall in the laundry room, and from there went on a rampage through every nook and cranny of our house. Well, maybe more than one mouse. We had no idea how they were getting in, so the pillaging went on for quite a while.
Long story even longer, at least one ended up in our kitchen cabinets. I had to clean and disinfect the cabinets, wash everything, and threw out lots of stuff. So probably that’s what happened to the pastry bag.
Anyway……I had no pastry bag, so I decided to put the dough in a plastic sandwich bag and cut off the corner. Only it turns out I had fancy sandwich bags that are pleated to make square bottoms, so no real corner. Forging ever onward, I cut a hole and squeezed out just a horrible mess. I wasn’t about to give up at this point, so I used a knife to sort of smush the pastry into something that resembled what might turn out to look like eclairs. And guess what, they didn’t look too bad, see!
Of course, not having a pastry bag, I couldn’t inject the pastry cream into the eclairs, so I just cut them in half. It’s probably better anyway, because how can you tell how much cream you’re squeezing in when you can’t see it?
I didn’t have semi-sweet chocolate, but I had some bittersweet chocolate chips, so they worked for the glaze. All things considered, they didn’t look to bad, and more importantly they tasted pretty darn good. So you don’t have to be a pastry chef, and you don’t have to have all the fancy shmancy tools of the trade to make your culinary dreams come true. Raise a glass, lower your expectations, and make some chocolate eclairs for yourself. Have two….they’re small 🙂
