Bienvenue a Le Cordon Bleu: Demonstration 6

Demonstration 6: the Art of Choux Pastry
Warning: Tons of Photos Ahead!

By now we're delving into the land of choux pastries (a favourite.... among many favourites, that is!) and I was very excited to start this class. Definitely was looking forward to the tutorial!! Here we learnt to make the many french classic desserts: eclairs, choux puffs with creme filling, chouquettes and plenty more! They all turned out so beautiful!!!

 the huge variety of choux pastry desserts

chocolate and coffee eclairs

Choux pastry, for me, is one of the best things you can make! I love playing around with choux pastry! Mainly because I find that this patisserie is very versatile and flexible - you can make soooo many things with it ranging from sweet pâtisserie desserts to savoury ones - the possibilities are endless! But then, I just realised this applies to all the basic french pâtisserie goodies!

chocolate eclairs (top) and choux pastry with creme filling (bottom)

As for a choux pastry dessert, an absolute childhood favourite of mine was a savoury dish my mom used to whip up for us as an after school treat! She would make choux puffs and stuff them with a delightful mélange of flaked creamy tuna... oh... man... drool, much?

I wonder if i can get my mom to do that again for me one day?

Yeah right!!

Knowing my mom, she'll most likely tell me to make it myself as I've now already learnt how to make them! hehehe. I don't mind actually... but I'm quite sure it won't taste the same as hers! 

That always happens, doesn't it? That my friends is what we call the mommy touch.

More choux puffs with creme filling

For the sweet choux pâtisserie desserts, I've come to realised most of the time the fillings incorporate plenty of crémes in their core centre - something that by now (4 weeks into the school semester... 4 WEEKS!!) is something I've grown to dislike - actually more like grown to be sick of.

Why?

 

Because for the past 4 weeks, we've been sampling a sorted lot of crémes and I believe my tolerance for anything creamy has dramatically dipped to an all-time low. In fact, I think I'm not the only one in class experiencing this: during the taste-tests for practicals, I have noticed the remaining desserts left untouched by grubby pâtisserie student fingers are those with créme filling. Hahaha...

Practical 06: Making the Eclairs & Chouquettes.

Chef i-forgot-his-name evaluating and critique-ing our baked goods

In practicals, we got down and dirty on making our eclairs and chouquettes. I ended up with chocolate covered uniform! :(

The eclairs we made for practicals were chocolate-coffee flavoured (choc créme filling with a coffee glaze on top). My eclairs in particular had a very rich and dense creme filling - mostly because I secretly popped in extra servings of chocolates into my pastry cream. Did you know that eclairs have to be piped with filling until they become heavy in your hand? Yeah... that's a LOT of cream!!

For our class, the chef decided to tint our coffee glaze in an odd brown-red colour combo which to me seemed a bit odd. According to the chef, this is the colour of chocolate. What do you guys think?

 My huge ass wonky chocolate-filling coffee-glazed eclairs

I wasn't really fond of the eclairs we made in practical as I found them a bit too rich (my fault, really!) and furthermore I was a bit bothered by the wonky shapes they had formed into during the process of baking. I wonder how the patisserie shops always manage to make then uniformed and perfect in shape?? Do they bake the eclairs in a mould?? 

Personally I've always been a chocolate-kind-of-girl but being in patisserie school, I think I've grown to love non-chocolate based desserts, such as: apple tarts (I really didn't like baked fruits before!) and more recently I've discovered the pleasantries of chouquettes!

 

 the chouquettes in demo

Deceptively simple to make, it's an amazing light dessert that you grow to become addicted to! It's like a popcorn: once you pop one in your  mouth, you'll just keep coming back for more! During the end of my practicals, Chef Faure kept nicking our chouquettes everytime he passed our tables! It was funny :)

 my chouquettes in practical

I think chouquettes would go well for an afternoon tea session! The sugar used for chouquettes is something of a wonder to me (mostly because you will NEVER find it in Brunei AND it's a new ingredient I just learnt about!). The sugar used in these recipes are called sugar pearls and they are made in such a way that when placed in HIGH HEAT, they won't dissolve! Awesome, right?

Apparently, I just recently found out that this is the same sugar used to make those thick bread-cake like waffles in Belgium as well!